I am reading cheap science fiction. In it, Hitler wants to deliver a package (say 2 kilos) from Berlin to Tokyo. Of course that whole WWII thing is in the way. I am fairly sure this could be done, but am unclear on how.
Perhaps, The Argentine diplomatic pouch to Switzerland. Then on the Buenos Ares, then to … and here I get lost. How could anything get to Japan with any sort of reliability?
Of course some very-long-range Italian aircraft flew across the Soviet Union to Japanese-controlled China during the War, but that does not come into play here.
On the same line of thought, how long would it take the package to get there?
Reading an Axis of Time book are we? (Weapons of Choice, Designated Targets)
Choices are submarine or submarines (German to one point/ transfer to Japanese) or plane to Argentina (I believe that the Condor could/did make that trip) then transfer to Japanese sub
History Channel had a show about a U-Boat that left for Japan close to the end of the European campaign, loaded with a few scientists and some uranium, in the cockameemee hopes that Japan could put together an A-bomb. So, subs were the most likely method, methinks.
We can get the package to Argentina (or Mexico) by diplomatic pouch to Switzerland, then to Spain by sealed train (they ran once a week), then by neutral ship to Latin America. After that, is a sub our best hope?
I don’t see how we could get flexpad to Hitler in less than two months then.
I’m guessing the North Atlantic is too “unfriendly” to the Axis (what with the uptimers, and all) just to run the sub directly to Europe?
And, I just checked…it’s two years too late to use the surviving Zeppelins (The Graf and Graf II) for either a trans-eurasian or trans-polar run to Japan. And I don’t know how long it would take to design and build a new one. (Presumably, you wouldn’t have to build something on the scale of the Hindenburg to transport five pounds of cargo on a one-way mission. It’s not even without precedent—the Germans tried something similar in 1917, launching an intended one-way resupply mission (14 tons of cargo) from Bulgaria to troops in east Africa. The mission aborted after the ship received faulty information about a German surrender, but made it back to friendly territory safely.
Kids these days. We know how to ship a small package from Germany to Japan during WWII nowadays. It was shown in that great documentary **Furankenshutain tai chitei kaijû Baragon **, released in the US as Frankenstein Conquers the World:
The title is something of a cheat, since no actual worlds get conquered in the course of the film. But it does have the Heart of the Frankenstein monster transported via sub halfway around the world (“Axis Express – when it positively has to be there before D-Day”) and transplanted into a Japanese body (which explains howcum the monster has eyes with epicanthic folds)
Talk about your cheap science fiction!
The Joseph Scalia book, Germany’s Last Mission to Japan, that I mentioned in that thread goes into the problems the Germans and the Japanese had in maintaining contact earlier in the war. While the Wikipedia link supplied by Ranchoth applies the name Yanagi just to the U-boat trips, it appears that the name was also more widely applied to various surface voyages. These were initially relatively successful, with six ships making the voyage to Japan and twelve to Europe in the period between April 1941 and May 1942, though other ships were lost in making the attempt. The British estimates at the time were that about 60,000 tons of material had been shipped from Japan to Germany during the first half of 1942.
However from then on the surface option gradually got choked off. The British began to break more of the Japanese ciphers and were getting better at patrolling the Bay of Biscay, with the result that they got more successful at intercepting such traffic on that leg of the voyage. Some stuff was still getting through well into 1943, but it was in the early part of that year that German interest started to seriously switch to submarines as an alternative to keep the channel open.
So a package that needed to be sent in 1942 would at least stand a reasonable, though far from certain, chance of getting through on a surface ship. But if it were a special one-off small package, as specified in the OP, I’d expect that a more reliable method would involve diplomatic pouches - or even the postal service - via neutral intermediates, as suggested.
For the record, the Germans and the Japanese did have air service between two “allied” camps for most of the war. It only stopped sometime in 1944, when Soviet troops pushed the German army (and airfields) back out of aircraft range.
