How do they come up with the enemy nicknames like Charlie Tango and Jerry?

Answer 1

Answer The names of the enemy or even your own troops are derived from a variety of words or slang terms. This varied by country and war. Charlie started with the word "Viet Cong" which evolved to simply "VC". The phonetic alphabet was and still is used for letters in radio transmissions and thus VC in the phonetic alphabet is Victor Charlie. This was then shortened to charlie. so that became the name for any Viet Cong soldier. Tango is again derived from the phonetic alphabet, with Tango being the phonetic equivalent of T. Thus target was shortened to T and then subsequently Tango. Therefore when someone says "Tango down" they are stating target down. As for jerry i assume same process but it is not part of a phonetic alphabet, so don't know. This might help... "During the first year of [American participation in] the war the Americans had no slang word for German. Hun was used sparingly, but only by officers. Fritzie was rare. Boche was tried, but proved to be ill adapted to Americans. They seemed afraid of it, and, indeed, it was often pronounced botch. Finally, after a year all these foreign substitutes were abandoned by the enlisted men, and the German became Jerry. Curiously enough, the word was almost invariably used in the singular. We heard a soldier telling about a patrol encounter in which he and twenty companions had driven a slightly larger German force out of an abandoned farmhouse, and he said: ‘When we came over the top of the hill we found Jerry.’ He stuck to that usage all through the story. In the last year of the war the American army began to find names for various things, but the slang list of the first year was short. The French army was the most prolific of all in language, and several large dictionaries of French trench slang have already been published.”"