Casablanca directive

The Casablanca directive was approved by the Combined Chiefs of Staff (CCOS) of the Western Allies at their 65th meeting on 21 January 1943 and issued to the appropriate the Royal Air Force and United States Army Air Forces commanders on 4 February 1943. It remained in force until 17 April 1944, when the Allied strategic bomber commands based in Britain were directed to help with preparations for Operation Overlord.

The CCOS met during the Casablanca Conference when the Allies were deciding the future strategy of the war.

The directive set out a series of priorities for the strategic bombing of Germany by the air forces based in the UK (RAF Bomber Command and US Eighth Air Force. With modification in June, making German fighters (part of their main defence against Allied bombers) an "intermediate target " and the primary goal, it gave direction to the combined (USAAF and RAF) bombing offensive known as Operation Pointblank.

Memorandum C.C.S. 166/1/D by the Combined Chiefs of Staff, 21 January 1943:

The above order of priority may be varied from time to time according to developments in the strategical situation. Moreover, other objectives of great importance either from the political or military point of view must be attacked. Examples of these are:

C.C.S. 166/1/D was a revised and expanded version of the "C.C.S 166" document which had been presented for discussion to the Combined Chiefs of Staff on 20 January by the British Chiefs of Staff. The discussions brought up several issues, such as how to phrase the memorandum to balance the concerns of the different stake-holders about the priority to give to anti-U-boat activities as opposed to support for the planned operations to take place in the Mediterranean theatre. Two changes were proposed and agreed that the addition "for political reasons" should be inserted into "... issued from time to time [for political reasons] by His Majesty's Government ..." and that the word "synthetic" was removed "Synthetic oil plants". Further changes were made to the British draft of the memorandum in the ordering of some of the sentences.

...
Wikipedia