McCloughry joined the
Australian Imperial Force in 1914, and served as a
military engineer in
Egypt and
France before transferring to the
Royal Flying Corps (RFC) in December 1916. He graduated from flying training in August 1917 and was posted to
No. 23 Squadron RFC on the Western Front. He was seriously injured in a crash shortly thereafter and, after recovering in hospital, was reassigned as a
flight instructor. He was reassigned again in 1918 to the
Australian Flying Corps (AFC). He scored most of his victories there in the last few months of the war. McCloughry left the AFC in August 1919 and pursued a career as an engineer in the United Kingdom before joining the
Royal Air Force (RAF) in 1922. He served in a strategy-planning capacity through the Second World War. In 1940, under the influence of
Lord Beaverbrook, he circulated a series of anonymous memos which were highly critical of senior RAF figures; in response, he was posted to South Africa, but the fallout continued and by the end of the year the
Chief of the Air Staff and several other commanders had been replaced. McCloughry retired from the RAF in 1953 as an
air vice-marshal, and died in 1972 in
Edinburgh. ==References==