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The CBI was indeed a forgotten theater. One of my college friends’ dad was a Air Corps ground crew in India. He had some interesting stories, but knew he was in a “backwater” more or less.

There were so many reasons the deck was stacked against the CBI ever being meaningful.

1) Lumping the CBI together was an inherently awkward conglomeration of competing interests. The British were interested in preserving the Empire in India and restoring it in Burma and Malaya. The United States had no interest in doing that, but still wanted to help China, who also had no interest in preserving or restoring the British position in the East.

2) It was the rock bottom logistic priority for both the British and Americans. The British simply could not spare anything for the theater, and the Americans had much higher priorities elsewhere. American resources were vast, but nonetheless finite. CBI just didn’t rate, and we made it very clear early on that the United States was not going to commit any substantial ground force for Burma, because we were not out to maintain the British Empire.

3) Location, Location, Location part 1: The CBI theater was geographically on the far side of he world, with the enemy more or less blocking the direct supply routes. It might as well have been on the far side of the Moon.

4) Location, Location, Location part 2: Burma was the perfect defensive bastion for the Japanese. It is geographically isolated by mountain barriers with India and China. Those mountains have few natural passes for communications. It was climatologically protected six months out of the year by the Monsson that made military operations impossible. The Japanese conquered it with four divisions, and held it for four years with only five. Small change in terms of resources, but made possible because the Americans and British simply could not get at them.

5) China and India were economically backward, and incapable of anything more than providing cannon fodder. And the Indians didn’t provide that much as, by that time, they weren’t willing to fight for the British Empire either. We all know how corrupt and incompetent Chaing’s Nationalist regime was. So there just weren’t any meaningful local resources to use against the Japanese.

So it was very much the forgotten war for men like Russell Moody of Gary Indiana, who toiled in anonymity servicing airplanes before coming home to work a career at Inland Steel.