Destination Casablanca, by Meredith Hindley ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Meredith Hindley’s Destination Casablanca: Exile, Espionage, and the Battle for North Africa in World War II succeeds on so many levels that I had trouble deciding where to begin this review. With so much attention having been paid in recent years to WW II action in mainland Europe and the Pacific, especially through feature films and TV mini-series that reach huge audiences ( Saving Private Ryan, Band of Brothers, Dunkirk, Pearl Harbor, The Pacific ) it’s gratifying to see the spotlight turned on a lesser-known theater of operations. Casablanca, a port city on the Atlantic coast of Morocco, in the northwest corner of Africa, became an important place in the world in the aftermath of the fall of France, when the French government, and their military forces capitulated to Nazi Germany, compromising with their conquerors by establishing a collaborationist Fascist government in the south of France in exchange for giving up Paris and the north. Refugees from France, and inde