As a student pilot, Anne Noggle built up flying time buzzing trains and cows and navigating between Chicago and Peoria by swooping down to read road signs.
She lived in Evanston, attended Evanston Township High School and started flying at 17 with her mother`s support and her grandmother`s admonition that such support amounted to signing a death warrant.
Noggle flew out of Northwest Airfield, now cemented under the subdivisions near northwest suburban Palwaukee Airport, where she also flew until she was 21 and went into training in Texas at a U.S. Army Air Forces
(now U.S. Air Force) base for the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP). An extraordinary group for their times or any times, the women pilots flew non-combat missions during World War II, but their efforts went largely unrecognized until recent years.
Noggle, now a photographer, helps set the record straight with her new book, ”For God, Country, and the Thrill of It: Women Airforce Service Pilots in World War II” (Texas A&M University Press, $29.95). In an opening essay, Noggle recounts her experiences in the service, but she reserves most of the space for current portraits of 49 other former WASPs, an alumnae that numbers approximately 800.
Noggle arrived at Avenger Field in Sweetwater, Texas, in 1943 with women cadets accepted from around the country for a six-month WASP training program. ”Before World War II most of us hadn`t been very far from home. I remember a classmate from California who agreed with me that she didn`t like the East very well until we discovered she was referring to Sweetwater and I to New York City,” Noggle recalls in ”Remembrance,” her esssay in the book.
The essay combines nostalgia with enough drama for several TV mini-series. She reports, for instance, how the sleeve of one pilot`s oversized coverall caught on a seatbelt and unlocked it while she was recovering from a spin. The pilot fell out of the plane but coolly pulled her ripcord and parachuted into a field of crops, Noggle reports.
The WASPs served in 1943 and 1944 and by the end of the war when the corps was disbanded, more than 1,000 of them had received their wings. But they remained civilians even as they ferried planes new and old over thousands of miles, towed targets for fighter plane gunnery practice and sometimes died because of storms, mechanical failure and other accidents.
”Our losses were the same as for men in non-combat jobs,” Noggle says. She dedicates her book to the 38 women pilots who lost their lives during their World War II tour of duty. The Air Force, acting on Congressional authority, recognized the WASPs as veterans of active military service in 1979. They deserved that much just for going through the training.
”We got up in the wintertime before daybreak and I can remember we ran down to the gate and back in formation before breakfast, sometimes before dawn,” Noggle says. The training day was divided into flight time and ground school with physical training, dinner and homework packed into the hours before taps.
”We had to take a college refresher course in physics even though most of us had never been to college or studied physics, so we had to work hard,” she says.
As civilians, the women were free to resign at any time, but most stayed on and those good enough to solo proudly earned their wings.
”Once you soloed, the others would just grab you marching to class or somewhere and throw you in the wishing well,” Noggle recalls. The wishing well, where men and women cadets threw coins for good luck, is memorialized in one of several old snapshots WASP alums provided for use in the book.
Noggle`s longtime friend Dora Dougherty Strother wrote an insightful and fact-packed history of the WASPs as an introduction to the book. Strother, who was also a WASP, is the retired manager of two design groups with Bell Helicopter-Textron and now works as a private consultant.
”Of the 25,000 women who applied for flight training, 1,830 were accepted and 1,074 received their wings,” Strother writes.
Noggle photographed Strother`s portrait for the book. Indeed, the portraits, taken against a neutral background that focuses attention on the women themselves, are the heart of the book. Noggle took them in 1986 during the biannual reunion of the pilots in New Mexico.
Pride and confidence are hallmarks of these pictures. Some women wear their uniforms and the rest wear every manner of civilian dress. But all of them wear their wings and their age with the distinct bearing of people who challenged their own strength of character and won.
”I knew we were different. I didn`t know if it showed. I wanted to investigate us,” Noggle says of her decision to make the photographs. ”A lot of my work has to do with aging. When I was a younger person, I discounted older people and found them to be outside the course of the world. I wanted to change how people look at older people.”
After the war, Noggle returned to civilian flying as a teacher and crop duster in the Southwest. The Air Force offered commissions to the former WASPs in 1949 and Noggle joined during the Korean War. The Air Force didn`t allow women to fly military planes at that time, but her commission brought Noggle to Paris where she was a protocol officer and made her entry into the visual arts.
”When I was in Paris, I really discovered art. I started going to the Louvre and I began looking at all the art in Paris and I really got excited. I even bought paints,” she says.
She retired as an Air Force captain due to lung problems and returned to college to study art history. ”I decided I couldn`t be a painter because I couldn`t draw very well,” she says. She took a photography course so she could make good slides as an art historian and got hooked on photography.
Noggle, 67, lives in Albuquerque and teaches at the University of New Mexico.
She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and three grants from the National Endowment for the Arts to pursue past photography projects. She says she is seeking grant funds to travel to the Soviet Union to photograph.
