Among the many individual battles that will be commemorated this year on the anniversary of Allied victories in WW2, are those of the brutal campaign against the Japanese in Burma (as Myanmar was then called). Fought in jungle and parching heat, the long battle for Burma turned in February-March of 1945, eighty years ago, with Allied victories at the key towns of Meiktila and Mandalay. The Burma campaign, as one historian wrote, had “the elements of a great Homeric saga…. it took place in a fantastic terrain, isolated by great mountains and jungles from any other theatre.”

Adjacent to this epic strife, and entangled with it, were the events of the little-known China-Burma-India arena, known as CBI, which are less likely to be the object of significant commemoration. As its name indicates, CBI operations extended beyond India and Burma into China, and reflected specifically-US interests, yet even in the US few today know its history.

In part this is because the CBI’s objective of fostering a close relationship between the US and China in the post-war world was so obviously a failure; in part, too, because it was so chaotic that even those who participated in the CBI were often unclear what they were doing there. A retired US Army Air Forces colonel who had been based in China, made a common assessment: “I cannot dwell on the military causes and effects of my mission,” he wrote. “I must drop that flat before I become utterly confused again.” CBI, it was said, stood for Confusion Beyond Imagination.

Competing interests of the British and American allies afflicted the CBI with a chaotic, “necessarily abnormal” (according to US Army chief of staff George C. Marshall) structure of command. Friction between the Allies was a fact of the war, but in the CBI this was massaged into vicious enmity and it spawned many shocking and now little-known events. These included an extraordinary motion made in Parliament to declare a US general “persona non grata in any war theatre where British officers and men are serving,” and a US plot to assassinate the Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek by dropping him from an aircraft as it flew over the “Hump” of the Himalayan foothills.