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.

Friday, January 23, 1943. Chinook.

A Chinook wind caused an increase in temperature in Spearfish, South Dakota, in which the temperature went from -4F to 45F in two minutes.  It ultimately went up to 54F over two hours, then dropped back below 0 in 30 minutes, all of this in a single morning.

Papua was liberated from the Japanese, becoming the first territory they had captured from which they'd been completely expelled.

Japan's losses on the island were 13,000 in number, compared to 2,000 for Australia and 600 for the United States.

On the same day, the British 8th Army took Tripoli.

According to many sources, today, not yesterday, was the date on which the Germans lost their last airfield at Stalingrad.

French police and German forces began the Marseilles Roundup, the gathering and deportation of the city's Jewish population.  The action would result in the deportation of 1,642 people, the displacement of 20,000 and the arrest of 6,000.  The Old Port district was destroyed.

Margaret Bourke-White flew in a U.S. bombing mission over Tunis in the B-17 Little Bill.  The photographer and reporter was the first woman to do so.

Bourke-White was already a famous photographer by that time, having photographed extensively during the Great Depression and having photographed the Soviet Union prior to World War Two.  She died at age 67 in 1971 of Parkinson's Disease.

Franklin Roosevelt dined with Moroccan Sultan Mohammed V, during which he expressed sympathy for post-war Moroccan independence.

Roosevelt was always solidly anti-colonial, a fact that became an increasing problem for the British as the war went on and which would impact the immediate post war world.

Friday, January 15, 1943. Tragedies and the Pentagon dedication.

US B-24s bombed a Japanese convoy off the coast of Burma and sank the Nichimei Maru, which was, unbeknownst to them, carrying 1,000 Dutch and Australian POWs.  Most survived, but over 50 lost their lives.

Eric Knight, author of the Lassie books, died in a C-54 air crash in Dutch Guiana.  He was serving as a Major in the U.S. Army and assigned to Special Services at the time.

Knight had been born in 1897 in the United Kingdom.  His family moved to the US in 1912, but he'd only been an American citizen since 1942.

FBI agents Harold D. Haberfeld and Percy E. Foxworth were killed in an aviation accident in Suriname.  The were flying to North Africa at the request of Gen. Eisenhower in a role seconded to the military at the time.

Topographic map of Pentagon area in 1945.

The Pentagon was dedicated.  Construction had only commenced on September 11, 1941, which says something about. . . well something.

The British launch a new offensive against the Afrika Korps at Beurat, Libya.  Tunisia saw a lot of air action on this day, and Tripoli, Libya was bombed by US and RAF B-24s.

Andrée de Jongh

Belgian resistance worker and member of the nobility, Andrée de Jongh, organizer and leader of the Comet Line that assisted downed Allied aircrewmen to escape the Germans, was arrested in southern France.  She survived the war and went on to work in leper hospitals all over the world thereafter.  She was decorated by the United States and United Kingdom after the war, and made a Belgian Countess.

The XP-54 flew for the first time.

The airplane was a pusher, and performed below expectations and therefore did not enter service.

Saturday, January 2, 1943. Horse Meat Won't Hurt, Beachead at Buna-Gona.

 

Basketball game, Colorado River Relocation Center, Poston, Arizona, 1/2/43.

American and Australian forces captured the beachhead at Buna in the Battle of Buna-Gona, New Guinea.

Gen. Eichelberger was under orders from MacArthur to "Take Buna, or don't come back alive".

The Saturday Evening Post featured a Leyendecker with a helmeted naked baby swinging into the New Year on holding tenuously onto a musket.

Science News assured its readers that Horse Meat Won't Hurt.  The article noted, amongst other things, that very few horses were actually slaughtered for meat in the US in any event.

According to Sarah Sundin:

Today in World War II History—January 2, 1943: In Libya, the port of Tripoli is closed to Axis ships due to Allied bombing. New songs in Top Ten: “Moonlight Becomes You,” “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To.”