Into the Blue

By Norman Macmillan

Into the Blue is widely regarded as a literary classic. Originally published in 1929, and 44 years since its latest publication, Grub Street reintroduces you to Norman Macmillan’s insightful and gripping book about his experiences as a pilot during the First World War.

Wing Commander Norman Macmillan, OBE, MC, AFC, DL, was born on 9 August 1892 in Glasgow.

After serving sixteen months in the Highland Light Infantry, he joined the RFC in 1916. He learned to fly at Netheravon, and in 1917 went to 45 Squadron on 1½ Strutters. Norman flew many missions on this type and claimed two victories before 45 were re-equipped with Camels in August 1917; Norman then gained his first Camel victory in the same month they arrived. On 11th September he twice claimed Fokker Triplanes out of control during two separate engagements in the space of a few minutes. Macmillan went on to claim nine victories in all. After being injured in an unfortunate accident on 6th January 1918 he did not see further combat and returned to England to become a flight instructor.

After his experience in the First World War, he was closely associated with flying for many years and also became an enthusiastic writer of aviation books; of which, Into the Blue is the best. In 1925 Norman was the first person to make an emergency landing at Heathrow, which was then a row of cottages. During World War Two he became wing commander war correspondent, before retiring to Cornwall, where he became Deputy Lord Lieutenant of that county. Norman died on 5 August 1976 aged 83.

Norman Macmillan was decorated with the Military Cross for conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty in 1918 and was also later awarded the prestigious Air Force Cross.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Grub Street Publishing
• Release date: Aug 19, 2015
• ISBN: 9781910690819

Book preview

Part One

PUPIL

Chapter I

THE VISIONARIES

British military flyers have always been volunteers. Before WW1 a candidate for the Royal Flying Corps had to prove his aptitude by first obtaining a Royal Aero Club pilot’s certificate at his own expense at a civilian flying school. War changed this. Then volunteers were first interviewed by an RFC officer. His questions followed the pattern of the time.

‘Why do you want to transfer to (or join) the Royal Flying Corps?’

‘Because I want to fly.’

‘Can you ride?’ (This question sprang from a belief that the hands of a horseman made a natural pilot, and by analogy with cavalry reconnaissance the RFC was seen as ‘The Cavalry of the Clouds’.)

‘I have ridden.’

‘Have you sailed a boat?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you know anything about internal-combustion engines?’

‘I know the Otto cycle and two-stroke principles.’

‘Have you driven motor cars or motor cycles?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you know anything about flying?’

‘I have read Flight, Aeronautics, The Aero and The Aeroplane since Blériot flew the Channel. And I know something of Lanchester’s books,’ averred one enthusiast.

The interviewing officer smiled.

He knew that most aspirant pilots knew very little about flying.

What they did know was only sufficient to whet their appetites.

It was best so.

Otherwise, in the then state of knowledge, they might have been obsessed with theories and ideas which, in those days, from errors of assumption, might have proved disastrous to a novice in the art of flying. ‘You’ll do,’ he said.

Candidates from the infantry could not be accused of seeking greater personal safety by transferring to the RFC. They might be incurring even greater risk, but at least they had a chance of living a cleaner life than the men in the muddy, verminous trenches.

Their medical examination was perfunctory. Colour vision was tested from a bunch of different coloured wool threads held by the examiner. From them the candidate picked those the colour of which the examiner mentioned. I suppose it defeated any with vision less than tri-colour.

In 1916 the probationer’s next move was to a course at one of the two new Schools of Military Aeronautics (Reading or Oxford) to study rudimentary theory under a capable staff.

There pupils became acquainted with the mysteries of rigging wood, wire and fabric aeroplanes and the mechanism of internal-combustion engines, learned to read maps and understand compasses, struggled with Morse and that instrument of torture to sensitive souls, the buzzer. With these and many other subjects – theory of flight, electricity, magnetism, meteorology, clock codes, magnetos, carburation, lubrication (of engines) – they lived their days and dreamed their nights for a month.

On 12 October 1916 I reported at No. 2 School of Military Aeronautics at Oxford. The War Office had taken over some of the colleges. I was allotted to Lincoln. I recall the narrow, winding steps I traversed when climbing to and descending from my small cell-like room, with its mullioned window overlooking the quadrangle. It gives me quiet nostalgic pleasure to remember that my shoe leather wore yet another imperceptible fraction deeper the rounded hollows in those ancient stones.

One room was locked. It was said that an officer sleeping there during an earlier course awoke one night and saw an Indian’s head at the foot of his bed. Next he felt as if fingers were contracting on his throat. He fought against this thought, or fact, whichever it was; but the experience unnerved him and he could not continue the course.

The Army had no psychiatrists to handle such matters then and the military authorities would not admit that apparitions were on their roster. The room was allotted to another officer who knew nothing of the story. When he suffered the same infelicific fright in the night the room was locked and kept out of use. The legend we heard was of an Indian being chased up to that room and done to death in it at the time of the Black Hole of Calcutta. The tale may have been a myth. The locked door was not.

A high wall divided Lincoln and Brasenose colleges. These adjacent colleges had once maintained a jealous rivalry. Sixteenth and seventeenth-century Town and Gown often fought, using any weapons to hand, with scant respect for the dignity or value of human life. Townsmen, hunting a Brasenose undergraduate through the streets, intent on exacting a sacrifice to all that they in their folly believed to be their honour, drove their hounded man, panting, to the gate of Lincoln. He beat upon its nail-studded, oaken door. The visor trap opened. The fugitive demanded sanctuary from the man of the peering face.

‘Where are you from?’ demanded the guardian of the door.

‘Brasenose.’

‘No Brasenose man enters Lincoln.’

The visor trap shut. The door remained barred.

The mad, unthinking mob caught up with their prey there and battered him to death. Lincoln Collegers have ever since paid yearly penance to the Brasenose Collegers in ale spiked with ivy; the anniversary of the murder became the one day in the calendar when the gate in the high dividing wall was unlocked – for the penance to be paid.

At Lincoln I was awakened every morning by the pealing of many bells, for these were not silent during the First World War as they were in the Second. Each morning, after breakfast, we paraded in the quadrangle and marched through the streets to our instructional centre in wartime wooden buildings at the periphery of Port Meadow, on Sundays to a church parade which was then a compulsory feature of Army life (and, I think, better so).

Horatio Barber, the designer of the pre-war Valkyrie canard monoplane, with which he had run a flying school at Hendon, was now a captain in the RFC and one of our technical instructors. He was capable, but austere. Another instructor with an ebullient nature I afterwards met when he was a salesman for a prominent gin distillery. The others left little mark on one’s memory.

Our instruction ranged over past and obsolescing equipment of the RFC. It did not forecast developments; probably these were kept secret even from the instructors. The result was a suitable grounding for the previous year, not for the year ahead, which was the one that mattered to us.

After the final examinations a party of officers (of whom I was one) was sent to Coventry on a special course from 26 November to 12 December 1916. There we were comfortably billeted in the King’s Head, an old coaching hostelry destroyed in the 1939–45 war. I think the purpose of the course was to keep us occupied until there were vacancies for us at the flying training schools, but it brought us right up to date in knowledge of current equipment.

An RFC Crossley tender came for us daily and drove us to Coventry and Birmingham factories. These we toured with expert factory engineers as guides. The Siddeley Deasy Motor Car Company was making air-cooled V-aero-engines, but I saw a small batch of BHP water-cooled aero-engines under early conversion to the Siddeley Puma straight six, an engine that looked a tremendous advance on the others. The shops were a noisy symphony of clattering machine tools, driven from overhead shafting by ballata belting, and the percussive sounds of small drop hammers. Swarf from lathes fell to the floor like glittering snow. A first-aid post stood ready to deal with accidents. Engines were tested without silencers in a row of rough-built, open-ended sheds along one side of the factory ground.

The firm also made shell cases and parts for shell fuses. We saw one young woman with deft fingers operating a fuse ring stamping tool so fast that she could earn £27 a week on piece work, money worth about £100 today. Most of us had already fought with the PBI in France. It hit us starkly that tommies in the trenches were paid seven bob and flight commanders leading formations into battle over enemy territory about £7 a week. But we had not been sent to Coventry to make pay-packet comparisons. We were there to see the effort behind the fighting troops and more especially the build-up of material for the RFC. Yet we could see no reason why workers in safe jobs were paid so much more than men who daily risked their lives to keep those workers safe; and we realised that the firm’s profits must have risen in proportion. Here was a pattern of inequity that needed scrutiny.

We saw Standard Motors making Sopwith Pup single-seater fighters and during their assembly a transfer of the maker’s Union Jack trade mark was stuck on the interplane struts. Here there were more women workers than men. At Daimler’s we examined aero engines and engines for tanks, both during manufacture and under test. Near the factory was a tank-testing ground. We watched them there and rode in one and found it a battering, unwieldy monster of rude metal that ripped one’s clothes and abraded one’s skin when its elephantine motions heaved one about its interior as it fell into and laboured out of the artificial ditches and shell-holes of the proving ground. Those were early tanks, without differential track steering; trailing, articulated, steel twin wheels served them as rudders; part ship, part land vehicle thinking had inspired their elementary design. After this experience I never wondered that the 1916 tanks did not achieve more for us in France than they did.

One evening when we returned to the hotel one of our party found a letter awaiting him. He came down from his room looking utterly miserable and drank more than his customary one glass before dinner. He told us his fiancée had written, breaking off their engagement. He seemed inconsolable, but there was little we could do to comfort him, for we knew nothing of the girl or the circumstances.

We always had our after-dinner coffee in the bar room, where a coal fire burned in an open grate about which we pulled our chairs. Usually we turned in at about 10 o’clock. But this evening an open Silver Ghost drove through the porte-cochère and parked in the courtyard. Its occupants, a tall man and two girls, entered the bar room, where sandwiches were served to them because the dining room had closed for the night. The man, a civilian, was uncommunicative. He stood at one end of the bar, eating and drinking numerous whiskies, without saying a word to anyone. But the girls seemed delighted to find so many officers. They chattered freely and had drinks with us. Both were dressed in black, had dark hair and eyes, were comely, trim, attractive and vivacious, spoke well and seemed of good family. They might have been sisters; we did not know. The elder was rather buxom; the younger, of full, rounded figure, was the prettier.

When I went up to my room, its other occupant, a fellow Scot, was sitting up in the farther bed, reading; in the Service fashion we were all billeted two to a room; whether this custom is for economy or morals I have never been able to decide. He was a teetotaller and always retired early. He looked up from his book and said there had been a din ever since that man and these two young women had arrived. He turned to his book again as I unbuttoned my tunic and loosened my tie.

At that moment the door opened. The younger girl came in, fully dressed, looked quickly about the room, then walked over to me and raised her arms as if to put them about my neck. But I took a step back, away from her. She must have picked up my forename in the bar room, for she looked straight up into my eyes and said in a perfectly conversational voice: ‘Come and sleep with me, Norman. My man’s drunk and useless and I want a man tonight.’ I had never known a girl make such a blunt carnal invitation before and was too surprised to answer. I suppose I looked at her with an expression of distaste.

My brother Scot looked at us and saw that I wanted nothing to do with her. He reached up for the bell-push that hung on a cord from the ceiling between the bed-heads. ‘If you don’t get out of this room quick, you Jezebel,’ he said, ‘I’ll ring for the hotel manager.’

She turned and left without a word and we never saw her again. But she found the man whose engagement had just been broken off and he slept with her. At breakfast he looked more morose than the night before and it was obvious that he now regretted not only his lost fiancée but the lapse that had lost him forever his own irrecoverable virginity.

When our visit to Coventry ended we returned to Oxford and were posted to various reserve squadrons (the term then given to flying training units) and many of my temporary companions I never saw again.

Picture the pilot-to-be in a railway compartment on his way to the real thing, the actual flying at a flying school. He knew so much theoretically, but practice was the only thing that could really count. He did not even know if he possessed the flying temperament. He had not had to pass any aptitude tests. He might not be able to balance his machine.

His ignorance of his new profession struck him as overwhelming. Mentally he framed unanswerable questions.

What was the sensation of flying?

How extraordinary it must be to sit up aloft in a frail structure of wood, wire and fabric, with the wind whistling about his head and shoulders.

Would his nerves stand it?

Would it inspire terror or delight?

Would he be able to endure the effects of altitude, a factor his medical examination had ignored?

Would he – but there were a thousand questions in the new adventure, questions with which his imagination grappled defeated. Gazing out of the windows at the passing hedgebound fields, he wondered which would be suitable for the landing of an aeroplane. He had to admit he did not know. He was in square one.

He knew that the elementary training aeroplanes of the RFC at that time were Maurice Farman biplanes of French origin and 1913 and 1914 design. He knew what they looked like from pictures. The later one had all its stabilising and elevator and rudder surfaces at the tail and was nicknamed the Shorthorn. The earlier model had an additional forward elevator on projecting booms, which earned it the sobriquet of Longhorn.

He had heard that these affectionate and appropriate names arose from a chance remark of Major J. F. A. (later Air Marshal Sir John) Higgins who, seeing a line up of Maurice Farmans on an airfield, exclaimed: ‘Voilà les vaches mécaniques!’ and from mechanical cows the herd was subdivided into Longhorns and Shorthorns.

He had heard, too, how much easier the Longhorn was to fly because its forward elevator gave its pilot a head-up display. The Shorthorn denied its pilot any such visual aid to balance and this was said to make it more difficult to manage. He had also heard that previous pupils had flown the Longhorn before passing on to the Shorthorn as an advanced type, but he did not know if this was still the drill.

He knew enough to understand the primitiveness of Maurice Farman’s design. The leading edges of the Shorthorn’s wings were the front spars; these carried the front struts, just as in the Wrights’ gliding and motorised biplanes of 1901–3. A complicated array of external wiring was used to brace the lightly built structure and to interconnect the pilots’ controls with the movable air surfaces; pilots called this wiring system ‘the birdcage’.

But of two inherent faults in Shorthorn design, about which no one had told him anything, he was blissfully ignorant.

The centre wing cell had four pairs of struts. The body (nacelle) which carried the main load, of crew, engine, propeller, fuel and oil, was attached to and fitted between the innermost two pairs of struts. To assist the cell’s spars to take that concentrated weight on their central part (especially during bad landings) these spars were arched, like a bridge, across the whole span of the cell. But this upward curvature was a weakness when side (compression) loads were applied to these spars. Thus Shorthorn strength for one load was gained by loss of it for another and at that time a less well apprehended one; this may have been at the root of some Shorthorn wing breakages in flight.

A cambered, lifting tailplane was the second design fault. It carried part of the Shorthorn’s weight in flight, but it provided less fore-and-aft stability than a non-lifting stabiliser and lift from it could automatically increase the steepness of a dive and retard recovery to level flight – another possible cause of accidents.

The Shorthorn was docile enough when flying level. But then its fastest speed was only about 60 miles an hour. Its latent dangers emerged in abnormal flight. Most contemporary flying instructors’ knowledge of aerodynamics was insufficient for them to be able to analyse Shorthorn design defects and advise pupils against possible consequences of ignorance. Their own safety routine was to fly sedately and eschew stunts. So it is probable that some, perhaps most, of the unfortunately too numerous fatal accidents during Shorthorn flying training were contributed to by ignorance of its inherent design defects.

From Ludgershall railway station RFC transport conveyed me across the bleak wintry landscape of Salisbury Plain to Netheravon airfield, where I entered No. 24 Reserve Squadron, commanded by Major Frank Walker Smith. I found that all my flying while there was to be on Shorthorns.

I was lucky in my instructors – Lieutenants Ryan, Spencer and Aird; all did the best they could do at that time. Before I went for my first preliminary joyride on 16 December 1916 Spencer showed me how to pass through the birdcage and climb the footholds properly, since a foot put in a wrong place could damage the frail structure. I wore the clumsy leather crash helmet that was obligatory for all pupils. Goggles could not be worn with it and we flew without them.

The nacelle was half-way up the interplane struts. A shallow side panel hinged down to simplify the gymnastic feat of entering it. When seated I lifted the panel and secured it with ordinary door bolts. I was in the nose, well ahead of the wings. Spencer sat behind, perched between the upper and lower wings’ front edges.

Wooden bearers, running aft from the nacelle’s structure, supported part of the engine between the wings and part behind them where the pusher propeller could revolve. An ack emma (signalese for air mechanic) stood within the booms and wires behind the propeller. It was his unenviable task to help to start the engine from his encaged position.

Before doing anything he first assured himself by question and answer that the pilot’s ignition was switched off and the gasoline turned on. Then he primed the engine from the carburetter. He did this by manually rotating the two-blade wood propeller as if he were himself a starter motor. It was hard work. When he thought he had done enough he paused and called to the pilot: ‘Contact, sir.’

After the pilot had responded by switching on his ignition and then announcing ‘Contact’, the ack emma hopefully and lustily heaved the propeller a quarter-turn round, while the pilot twirled a hand starter magneto to boost the spark at the plugs. Usually the Renault rattled into life after one or two heaves and the ack emma could emerge from his cage.

This air-cooled V8’s pistons had ample clearances. One could always hear them slapping against the cylinder walls, loudest when the engine was cold. With no device to compensate for cylinder expansion and contraction, its valves and tappets chattered incessantly. Its propeller revolved on an extension of the camshaft at half engine speed and the reduction gear was noisy. Since the Renault could not be enclosed and had only a scoop to direct the air flow on to its cylinders, there was nothing to deaden the medley of sounds it made.

The fuel tank, between the rear seat and the engine, was in a nasty place should a crash occur. The hot engine could break away from its mounting, rupture the gasoline tank, ignite its contents, and the burning mass might fall on the aircrew. The commander of at least one pusher squadron ordered his aircrews not to use safety belts, believing that in a crash they would be thrown clear of wherever the engine might fall.

Fortunately for their peace of mind, few, if any, pilots or pupils thought about the several features of the Shorthorn that lowered its safety level below par. Enough that they were flying! For what more should they ask?

Wartime flying-training schools never sang the pre-war RFC lament for victims of pusher crashes:

Take the cylinders out of my kidneys,

The connecting rods out of my brain, my brain,

From the small of my back take the crankcase,

And assemble the engine again.

Spencer waggled the flying controls. He did not watch the movable air surfaces to see that each moved in the appropriate direction. Nor did anyone ever tell me to do so. Instructors merely ensured that the controls were not slack, sticking, or stuck.

A dual set was fitted in my place. I put my hands lightly on it to follow its movements, but kept my feet clear of the rudder pedals.

A gentle wind blew from the east. We could take straight off without taxiing. Spencer opened the throttle. My seat vibrated in tune with the thrumming Renault. A7004 slowly moved off. She travelled faster and faster, bounding a little on the uneven ground of the grass airfield. The bounding had a nice, cushiony effect. The grass rushed past underneath, became a blur … We were in the air.

There had been no sense of acceleration and now speed seemed to disappear. There was only a steady upward glide and the endless vibrations from the engine.

Suddenly I felt the machine bump, literally bump, on something – a different centre of air pressure. Spencer righted the momentary unevenness. The red liquid in the air-speed indicator tube showed 55–60 miles an hour. The nose dipped slightly; at the same time the starboard wings tilted downward. I felt like leaning over to the other side to balance her. Before I really knew what had happened she was on an even keel again and facing another direction. We had merely turned. It was delightful and not too cold.

In the old Maurice Farman there was no sensation of speed once she had left the ground. She simply floated along. It was strange, just at first, to look sideways and see the wings resting on nothing that was visible. It was uncanny, weird! But, remembering my aerodynamics, I settled down to enjoy the perfect view of the countryside below. There were woods, farms, sheep, haystacks, and there, almost underneath the nose, was a winding river, the Avon.

Bump! The whole machine lifted bodily upward in the vertical plane and hesitated. It seemed to have taken her forward motion away. Spencer dipped her nose and she went on. The difference in the air currents above the river caused the bump where we were flying at 500 feet. She banked again to turn and, looking down to earth between the wings, I imagined what a glorious slide one could have down them back to earth. This first flight made fantasy come true to me.

The engine’s humming ceased and the nose went down at the same moment. The engine ‘phut-phutted’ – just ticking over. I looked down hurriedly to see where we were going to land and saw we were gliding straight toward the airfield, which I had forgotten existed. In another minute we touched lightly, uncertainly; then, gathering confidence, the wheels clung to Mother Earth. The Shorthorn bumped over the uneven surface and slowly stopped rolling. The Renault sang again and we taxied to the hangars. I had had my first flight.

Spencer turned to me.

‘Well, what d’you think of it?’

‘I enjoyed it immensely, but I thought there would have been more sensation in it.’

‘Yes, there would be on a fast machine. But it’s a great game, isn’t it?’

‘Yes! It is a game, and a good one, too.’

Therein lay the spirit of the RFC. Its flying members were more devotees of sport than warriors. They were hunters of big game, and some of them were, by nature, killers.

Three days later, Spencer took me up again, this time to 1,200 feet (the greatest height I reached in a Shorthorn) to practise letting out and winding in the wireless aerial that was housed on a hand-operated drum at the side of the nacelle. A bob-weight at the end of the copper wire held it taut against the air flow. It seemed to me to be a tedious and unnecessary chore, its sole advantage that it gave me a little more experience of being airborne.

That afternoon I had my first dual instruction. The method was very crude. There were no speaking tubes. If the instructor wanted to say something he had to throttle the engine and shout. As soon as he throttled the Renault he had to push the nose down, because the Shorthorn’s speed range was only about 20 miles an hour and her built-in drag was so great that she quickly slowed to a stall if the nose were not pushed down. Most instructors pushed the nose down before throttling the engine, to avoid the slightest risk of a stall. Pupils were not shown a stall and its effect. If they found this out later when flying solo they did so by their own incompetence or at their own choice and risk. My instructors’ methods were to fly with their hands and feet on their controls and mine on mine while I followed the movements they made to climb, fly level, glide, correct bumps, and turn, and later land and take off. When they guessed I had obtained reasonable imitative proficiency they gave me more freedom of control and in the end almost complete control but with their own hands and feet ready for prompt action if their pupil boobed. During this latter period an instructor’s hand would press on my right shoulder as a sign that I was to turn to the right. A left hand on my left shoulder meant turn to the left. A push or pull on my crash helmet meant nose down or up. If the synchronisation of the controls was not as good as it ought to have been I would feel them being moved against me with a force I had been told in advance not to resist. Then I was to watch to see what correction was needed to put my wrong right.

There was no speech pattern in flight, no standard form of verbal instruction on the tarmac. Instructors varied greatly in natural teaching ability and also in their degree of confidence (or timidity) in allowing pupils to handle the controls. Instructing then was neither a science nor an art and for the pupil it was largely a matter of luck. The most apt pupil was the one having the best imitative faculty. The faster he could thus engender confidence in his instructor’s mind the sooner he was given more freedom with the controls and so his progression towards solo flight became more rapid. But by flying solo sooner he had less airborne experience and was liable to fall victim to his own copyist’s skill by finding himself in a situation he had never had a chance to witness; and then, with his all too little theoretical or practical knowledge, he might be unable to sort things out alone in time to reach a safe conclusion. The glib pupil did not have always the best subsequent accident-free record.

In mid-winter, with such aircraft as we had, flying was impossible on many days, but instructional flying continued every day weather permitted. After my