Saturday May 8, 1943. The plan to defeat Japan.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff approved the Strategic Plan for the Defeat of Japan.

Count Fleet won the Preakness.

The great Western The Ox-Bow Incident premiered.  Featuring Harry Morgan and Henry Fonda, the film was partially what inspired Fonda to join the Navy.

The book by Walter Van Tilburg Clark is excellent as well.

Friday, March 5, 1943. Wings.

The Battle of the Ruhr, an Allied air campaign, well let's make this clear, a Western Allied air campaign, against the industrial heart of Germany commenced with a large raid by the RAF on the Krupp munitions factory at Essen.

The campaign would go on into July.

The final German holdout surrendered at Stalingrad.  On the same day, the NKVD shot five German officers it found who were hiding in the city.

The British Gloster Meteor, a jet engined fighter, made its first flight.

The fighter became operational in July 1944 and was the only Allied jet to engage in combat operations during the war.  It was first deployed against V1 flying bombs, an early drone, which made sense given that the V1 was a jet engined aircraft, but late in the war it was deployed on the continent. The RAF largely prevented it from being flown over Germany out of fear that one would be captured and then analyzed by the Germans, or the Soviets.

Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man was released by MGM

Thursday, March 4, 1943. Murders of Greek Jews and uprising of Greek partisans.

Jews in Bulgarian occupied Greece, annexed by Bulgaria as Belomorie, were gathered and deported to Treblinka.

This provides another example of how the Holocaust was expanding post German defeat at Stalingrad.

In northern Greece, the Battle of Fardykambos between Greek partisans of the National Liberation Front, and local residents, and the Italian Army commenced.  It would be a partisan success.

The Afrika Korps concluded Operation Ochsenkopf in Tunisia in failure.

Mrs. Minver won the Academy Awards for best picture.  Her acceptance speech remains the longest in Academy history at six minutes.

The drama was the first movie to win an Academy Award which was set during World War Two.

Saturday, January 23, 1943. Casablanca released.

Casablanca was given its general release.  Our review of it is here:

Movies In History: Casablanca

First of all, let me note that I made an error in my review of The Maltese Falcon.  The 41 variant of that film was released first, not Casablanca.  I don't know why I reversed the order, but I did.

Casablanca was released for general circulation on January 23, 1943.

At that time, Morocco was just recently brought into the Allied orbit.  Allied troops had landed there in November, 1942 with the landings being part of Operation Torch.  The Moroccan landings, much less discussed than the Algerian ones, actually took place at Casablanca.  French forces resisted the Allies briefly in Algeria and Morocco, before formally switching sides as part of a negotiated turn about in early November, 1942.  Casablanca was the host that January to the Casablanca Conference between Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt, where the policy of unconditional surrender was announced and agreed upon.

So how's the film hold up?

Well, the movie doesn't take place in 1943, it takes place in December, 1941, just before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The US isn't yet in the war.  Morocco is in the hands of the Vichy French, although at the end of the movie we learn about a Free French garrison in Brazzaville, a city in French Equatorial Africa.  Casablanca is, as the movie depicts it, as sweaty den of vice, filled with refugees seeking desperately to get out of Morocco and on to freedom somewhere else.  In the center of it is Rick's Cafe American, where everyone goes.  Working into this, we have Victor Laszlo, a Central European resistance leader and his beautiful wife Ilsa Lund, played by Ingrid Bergman.  Lund, we learn, was the girlfriend of Rick of Rick's Cafe, who proposed to her just as Paris was set to fall, not knowing that she was already married to Laszlo.  Laszlo and Lund need "letters of transit" to leave Morocco, and Vichy French control, and the cynical world-weary Rick is believed to have obtained them from the oily Signor Ugarte, played by Peter Lorre.  Through it all a charmingly corrupt Inspector Renault, played by Claude Rains, weaves his way.

If you haven't seen it, see it.  This is another film which, by some people's measure, is the "greatest" movie ever made, although it isn't as great as the film commonly taking that prize, in my view, that being Citizen Kane.  It's a great movie, however.  And it's all the more amazingly great when you realize how much the making of the film was beset by all sorts of difficulties.

But what of its place in history. Was Casablanca of 1941 like the way it was portrayed in this 1942/43 film?

Well, probably surprisingly close.

Places under European colonial administration were bizarrely reservoirs of traditional cultures, advancement of European ideas, and massive corruption.  All three are shown to exist in the film and, if in exaggerated fashion, probably not too exaggerated really.  Morocco was controlled by Vichy at the time.  Brazzaville actually was beyond Vichy control and French Equatorial Africa was held by France Libre, a Free French movement.  Portugal was a neutral and a destination for people trying to get to the United Kingdom and beyond, or for that matter into Spain and then Nazi Germany through France.

Letters of Transit?  Nope, no such thing.  It is, after all, fiction.

In terms of material details, well the film was a contemporary picture, and it has the pluses and the minuses noted in our review of the Maltese Falcon.  Male costumes, more or less correct, with Bogar again wearing a Borsolino fedora, maybe the same one. Women's fashion?  Well, women refugees probably almost never traveled with a radiant wardrobe.

Well worth seeing, however.

The movie had a limited release on Thanksgiving Day, 1942, in New York City.

It was not known to the general public that Franklin Roosevelt was in Casablanca, Morocco, at the time.

The 8th Army captured Tripoli. We erroneously had this date reported a couple of days ago.

US forces successfully concluded all major ground operations on Guadalcanal, effectively bringing the campaign to a conclusion, the second such conclusion in the Pacific in two days.

British commandos, with Norwegian support, raided Stord, a Norwegian island, in Operation Cartoon and put a pyrite mine out of commission for a year.