John R. Alison, an ace fighter pilot in World War II who helped organize and lead a broad American air campaign that enabled British forces to bog down the Japanese in the jungles of Burma, died Monday at his home in Washington. He was 98.

His son David confirmed his death.

Alison, a retired Air Force Reserve major general, was a lieutenant colonel in what was then the Army Air Forces in late 1943 when Gen. Henry Arnold, commander of the Air Forces, assigned him and another lieutenant colonel to organize Operation Thursday, which is credited with having helped protect India from invasion by the Japanese. The other lieutenant colonel was Philip Cochran, the model for the character Flip Corkin in the comic strip “Terry and the Pirates.”

The two young officers came to Arnold’s attention for their exploits before and in the early years of the war.

Alison, who would go on to qualify as an ace by taking down seven enemy planes, was the pilot who demonstrated the capability of the Curtiss P-40 Warhawk to the Nationalist Chinese leader, Chiang Kai-shek, when he came to the United States in 1940 to buy planes for the fabled American volunteer group the Flying Tigers.

In his book “Way of a Fighter” (1949), the commander of the Flying Tigers, Gen. Claire Chennault, recalled that “Alison got more out of that P-40 in his five-minute demonstration than anybody I ever saw before or after.” When he landed, Chennault said, members of the Chinese delegation “pointed at the P-40 and smiled, ‘We need 100 of these.’ ‘No,’ I said, pointing to Alison, ‘You need 100 of these.’ ”

Arnold decided he needed the two lieutenant colonels because the British, under Maj. Gen. Orde C. Wingate, had faced calamitous conditions in 1943 when they first tried to pin down Japanese occupation forces in Burma. Without air protection, the British slogged hundreds of miles into the jungle and had to leave their wounded to die.

At Wingate’s behest, Prime Minister Winston Churchill asked President Franklin D. Roosevelt to provide U.S. air support for another incursion. Arnold authorized the two officers to acquire as many aircraft and men as needed to put British forces behind Japanese lines, to set up airfields to supply them and to evacuate the injured.

“They wrote the playbook to do this on the fly, because nobody had ever done this before,” said Douglas Birkey, director of government relations for the Air Force Association. “Cochran and Alison are considered the grandfathers of the U.S. Air Force Special Operations Command.”

Alison is also survived by his wife of 60 years, the former Kathleen Arcidiano; another son, John; and three grandchildren.