Letter dated June 20, 2000 from Everett (Ike) Isakson to my mother Peggy Coffman, widow of Joseph Glenn Coffman. Ike was the navigator and Dad was a gunner.

Peggy,

Begin 2nd paragraph – I enclose a picture of the Gashouse Gus which we flew until our Hanover mission when it got shot up so bad they had to send it to subdepot. Later one of our buddy crews got it so shot up that it went back to sub-depot. From there it was assigned to the 487th Bomb Group, but it outlived our shiny new #489 by a couple of months. The Gashouse Gus went down over the Continent in March.
I’m sending a couple of little anecdotes that I wrote and the Time magazine cover showing General Leon Johnson who led us on our worst mission over Hamburg. Our base commander was Col. Laren Johnson. He was lost over the Atlantic Coast about June 1945 after he got back to the States.
Ike

Drawn from the records of the National Museum of the Mighty Eighth Air Force, Savannah, Georgia / http://www.b-24.net/aircrew/cnames.html