Play as · WW2 1939 · L1 · French Protectorate

French Morocco - September 1, 1939

French Morocco in 1939 is a protectorate in the classic French mould - a kingdom governed through, rather than in place of, its own sovereign. Since the Treaty of Fez in 1912, France has ruled Morocco not as annexed territory but as a protected state: the Sultan, Mohammed ben Youssef, reigns in Rabat with his throne, his flag and his religious authority intact, while real power sits with the Resident-General and the French administration built up under Marshal Lyautey. Lyautey's system, preserved after him, keeps the forms of Moroccan sovereignty as a deliberate instrument of control, co-opting the makhzen, the caïds and the notables. The country is a French base and a French investment: phosphates from the Office Chérifien des Phosphates, agriculture on settler estates, and above all Casablanca, a fishing town transformed into a great modern port and the economic engine of the protectorate. Morocco also supplies soldiers - the Moroccan tirailleurs and the goumiers of the Atlas are prized colonial troops. The strategic identity is the protectorate on the eve of war: a nominally sovereign kingdom held through its own institutions, valuable for its phosphates, its coast and its men.

Starting position

The starting board is a protectorate whose calm rests on indirect rule and whose importance is strategic geography. Authority runs from the Resident-General through the French services and out to the caïds and pashas who administer the tribes and towns in the Sultan's name; the Sultan himself is young, decorative and closely watched. The country is not fully pacified in living memory - the Rif War against Abd el-Krim ended only in 1926, and the deep south was subdued later still - so the French keep a substantial garrison and the goums as mobile colonial infantry. A small nationalist movement exists among the educated urban young, pressing at first only for reform of the protectorate rather than its end, and it is easily contained in 1939. Strategically, Morocco's Atlantic coast and the port of Casablanca make it a base of the first importance, coveted by every power with an interest in the western Mediterranean and the Atlantic approaches. The pieces are a co-opted monarchy, phosphate and settler wealth, a strong garrison over a recently-pacified country, and a coastline whose value is about to be proven by war.

What turns the campaign

What France wants from Morocco in 1939 is continuity: the protectorate order preserved, the Sultan compliant, the phosphates and harvests flowing, Casablanca's port secure, and the country serving as a stable base and a source of colonial troops for the war in Europe. What the war brings is a test of that order from above rather than below. When France falls in 1940, the Residency and the garrison come under Vichy, and Morocco becomes a Vichy dominion on the Atlantic - until, in November 1942, the Anglo-American Operation Torch lands at Casablanca and the other Moroccan ports, brings the fighting to Moroccan soil, and pulls the protectorate into the Allied camp and into contact with an America openly sympathetic to the end of empires. The campaign turns on holding the protectorate steady through these reversals - keeping the Sultan and the notables in place, the base functioning, the troops flowing north - while the deeper current stirs: the wartime experience, the Atlantic Charter's talk of self-determination, and the Sultan's own growing sense of his people's cause. Beyond 1939 lies the slow radicalisation of Moroccan nationalism, but in this year the protectorate still holds its shape.

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