WW2 air crews named and painted their airplanes crazy fun things. There were some complaints about it, but the brass had enough sense to let the crews do what they wanted. It was a way for them to take a bit of the edge off of the terrible strain they were under. (Very high death rates.)

My dad was a bit superstitious, all his combat rides were named "Round Trip Ticket". It worked :-)

https://imgur.com/zuY1vGA

https://imgur.com/QqlYM

That is brilliant on so many levels. Kudos to him!

Thank you. Above his funeral, another P-51 driver gave him a spectacular sendoff.

What's with the dozen swastikas in the first picture? Number of enemy planes he shot down?

They're the claimed enemy airplanes shot down. Some of those kills were shared with other airplanes. There were several gunners on the B-17, so the number there represents all of their work.

The painted bombs above it represent the number of combat missions.

My father was the navigator, which was up front. His gun pointed out the side, which made for rather difficult deflection shots. He said the favored attack by the Luftwaffe was head on, which made deflection shots as they passed that much harder. The nose of the B-17 is a plexiglass hemisphere, and he could see the Me-109's firing straight at them, and wondered how they could miss. Nowhere to go, nowhere to hide, no armor.

Are you sure? NASA still seems to use Snoopy in an official capacity (e.g. the Silver Snoopy award). Starting in the 80s they even started sending every Silver Snoopy pin up into orbit before it was given to the recipient.

I'm pretty sure all of the CMs and LMs were named by the astronauts themselves, but the names probably had to be approved after that.

My favourite names are Gumdrop and Spider from Apollo 9.