@aftertaste:
The Germans had blockade runners that would take technical specifications and equipment to Japan in exchange for exotic and rare materials. Now, I know almost nothing about the specifics historically, so I am on unfamiliar territory, but I was thinking of a rule where Japan and Germany exchange, say, a certain number of free technology rolls for Japan and a one time boost of IPC’s for Germany. This rule is even less fleshed out than the Maskirovka, so feedback is welcome.
If you’d like detailed information on the subject, a good source is the book “Reluctant Allies: German-Japanese Naval Relations in World War II”, by Axel Niestle and Yoichi Hirama – but the short version of the story is that German-Japanese cooperation in WWII was minimal. As the first two words of the title suggest, Germany and Japan didn’t provide each other with very much tangible help duing the war; there were a couple of cases of Japanese long-range submarines bringing valuable shipments of raw materials (such as important metals and rubber, if I’m not mistaken) to Germany, but I don’t think it amounted to anything of significance given the minuscule quantities involved. Germany, for its part, was reluctant to provide Japan with sensitive technical information, as I recall.
There were a few reasons for this lukewarm (in both directions) relationship. Part of the explanation is simple geography: Germany and Japan were on opposite sides of the world, a factor which even in peacetime would have been an inconvenience; in wartime, with the overland and oceanic routes between the two nations controlled by enemy nations (mostly the USSR and the UK), it became all that much more of an obstacle. There’s also the fact that Germany and Japan weren’t fighting a single grand unified war (the concept conveyed on the Allied side by Churchill’s phrase “the grand alliance”), nor even separate but coordinated wars (which is, Churchill’s rhetoric notwithstanding, a better description of what the Allied war effort was really like), but rather separate and unoccordinated wars that were tenuously connected at best. And there’s also the ideological context – specifically, the racial prejudices of both regimes against each other. The racist element of Nazi Germany’s political policies and military actions requires no elaboration, but a less obvious point is that Japan too was fighting a war with racist elements, i.e. a war purportedly aimed at freeing Asia from white European colonial imperialism. (The “purportedly” part refers to the the fact that, while Japan did indeed want to get rid of white European colonial imperialism in Asia, and said so quite publicly if I’m not mistaken, Japan also wanted to replace it with Japanese colonial imperialism, a detail about which they tended to be a little less forthright.) So Germany and Japan at the time, while both authoritarian and militaristic regimes, were hardly natural ideological partners and were suspicious and disdainful of each other to various degrees.
