CASABLANCA CONFERENCE

(Jan. 1223, 1943), meeting during World War II at Casablanca between President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill and their respective military chiefs and aides, who planned future global military strategy for the Western Allies. Though invited, Joseph Stalin declined to attend. The work of the conference was primarily militarydeciding on the invasion of Sicily (after completion of the North African campaign), apportioning forces for the Pacific theatre and outlining major lines of attack in the Far East, and agreeing on the concentrated bombing of Germany. However, Roosevelt and Churchill also found time to discuss nuclear bomb research, to consider the competing claims for the leadership of the French war effort against the Axis, and, most important of all, to demand an unconditional surrender from Germany, Italy, and Japan. Both the announcement and the policy of unconditional surrender came in for severe criticism after the war, when it was contended that opposition groups in Germany might have overthrown Adolf Hitler and negotiated an earlier peace if they had not been discouraged by fear of Allied vindictiveness. Churchill's reply was that any statement of terms acceptable at that time to Allied leaders and to their peoples, such as the partition of Germany, its complete demilitarization, and reparations in kind and in forced labour, would have been more discouraging still.