← Back to the front page

The Vanished Golden Submarine’s Final Journey and Fate

Khalid Elhassan December 8, 2024 14 min

I-52 - Underwater wreckage of the Golden Submarine — Underwater wreckage of the Golden Submarine. National Geographic

17. Cooperation Over Long Distances

Japanese Ambassador Saburō Kurusu, Count Galeazzo Ciano, Adolf Hitler, and German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop at the Signing Ceremony for the Tripartite Pact, Berlin, September 27, 1940. National Archives

In December, 1941, an amendment to the Tripartite Pact between Germany, Italy, and Japan was added to include a military agreement between the Axis partners. Part of the amendment sought to establish trade routes to exchange vital supplies, plus technological expertise and technical experts. By then, Germany had invaded the Soviet Union, so land trade and exchange between Japan and her European partners via the USSR was no longer an option. So the amendment called for exchanges via aerial and sea routes. The era’s airplanes could not reliably handle aerial routes that avoided Soviet airspace, so trade and exchange via sea was the only option left.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.