Guidebook Essay 4

Essay 4
For most of World War II there seemed to be a constant stretch of defeat for the Allies with endless battles and infinite casualties. The Germans swept through Europe using their lightning war strategy quickly taking small countries like Denmark and even Norway which received more Allied support than Denmark. Meanwhile in Africa the Italian dictator Mussolini had captured Ethiopia and with German help captured the nations of Greece and Yugoslavia. Even in the Pacific the Axis Japanese were making swift progress occupying Manchuria and taking over parts of the Philippine Islands. However the Allied leaders realizing that Hitler’s forces would soon overrun Britain and France, the only two combatants left in Europe, held several conferences between 1943 and 1945. These conferences developed the strategy that would win the war.
The first major conference occurred in Casablanca, Morocco between the dates of January 14th to January 24th, 1943. This conference called for the unconditional surrender of the Axis Powers and more tactically significant planned the invasion of Sicily from which the Allies hoped to gain a foothold in Italy. With this foothold they intended to liberate France and invade Germany to overtake Berlin and end the German invasion. These conferences were essential to the planning and execution of both militarily defensive, offensive and of political issues during and up until the final days of the Second World War. In July of 1943 the success of the Sicily plan led to several more tactical and political conferences between the Allied Leaders.
The second major conferences were the Cairo and Teheran Conferences in Egypt and Iran, respectively. These conferences were essential to the Allied stance on what course of action to take against Japan and the famous D-day Invasion. On November 22nd, 1943 in Cairo the United States and Great Britain discussed their island-hopping strategy to overtake the numerous Japanese held islands in the...