ABSTRACT
Following the success of ‘Torch’, Roosevelt suggested to Churchill that the CCS should be requested to ‘make a survey of the possibilities including forward movements directed against Sardinia, Sicily, Italy’ and other parts of the Mediterranean.1 Churchill replied that ‘Sicily is by far the greater prize’.2 The subsequent ‘Symbol’ conference at Casablanca (January 1943), however, began in ‘an atmosphere of veiled antipathy and mistrust’.3 The debate largely mirrored those over ‘Torch’. The JCS insisted that the strategy for 1943 should ‘ensure that the principal effort of the United Nations is directed against Germany rather than against her satellite states’ by an intensified air offensive and the invasion of north-west Europe.4 Further Mediterranean adventures, the British argued, would force Italy out of the war, while Turkey might come in. Awkward northsouth communications would make it difficult for the Germans to reinforce the Mediterranean swiftly or in strength.5 The Americans, however, ‘were united in the suspicion that the underlying motive of the British proposals to continue operations in the Mediterranean was to postpone the cross-Channel assault for as long as possible, if not to prevent it altogether’.6
