France had fallen three months earlier, and Britain stood alone against Germany in the west. On September 27, 1940, representatives of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan gathered in Berlin and signed the Tripartite Pact, binding each nation to come to the others' aid if any were attacked by a power not already at war with them. The agreement gave formal shape to what the world would soon call the Axis. It was less a friendship than a division of spoils: Germany and Italy took Europe for their sphere. Japan took Asia and the Pacific.