Why did sailors call the EC-121 Warning Star "Willie Victor"?

The EC-121 Warning Star was the military early-warning version of the Lockheed Constellation, used by both the US Air Force and the US Navy. Each service named it in its own way. Air Force crews adopted the aircraft's civilian nickname, "Connie," short for Constellation. Navy crews called it "Willie Victor."

The naval nickname comes directly from the aircraft's designation. Until 1962, the Air Force and the Navy had separate systems for naming their aircraft, which were unified that year. Before that date, the Navy designated these early-warning Constellations with the prefix WV-, as in WV-2 or WV-3. Pronounced with a slang version of the phonetic alphabet, those two letters sounded like "Willie Victor," and the name stuck among sailors. With the 1962 unification the aircraft became known as EC-121, but the nickname survived in crews' everyday speech.

The old Navy WV-2 and WV-3 had a second career in the Vietnam War. About 40 EC-121 were modified from those aircraft to work with ground-seeded sensors and detect troop movements along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and 25 were deployed to Korat air base in Thailand as part of Operation Igloo White. That configuration, the EC-121R, received yet another nickname: "Batcat." The history of the EC-121's names thus reflects that of its users: the same civilian airliner adapted for very different military missions, renamed by each of the services that flew it.