Tracer ammunition

Tracer ammunition (tracers) are bullets or cannon caliber projectiles that are built with a small pyrotechnic charge in their base. Ignited by the burning powder, the pyrotechnic composition burns very brightly, making the projectile trajectory visible to the naked eye during daylight, and very bright during nighttime firing. This enables the shooter to make aiming corrections without observing the impact of the rounds fired and without using the sights of the weapon.

When used, tracers are usually loaded as every fifth round in machine gun belts, referred to as four-to-one tracer. Platoon and squad leaders will load some tracer rounds in their magazine or even use solely tracers to mark targets for their soldiers to fire on. Tracers are also sometimes placed two or three rounds from the bottom of magazines to alert the shooter that his weapon is almost empty. During World War II, aircraft with fixed machine guns or mounted would sometimes have a series of tracer rounds added near the end of the ammunition belts, to alert the pilot that he was almost out of ammunition. More often, however, the entire magazine was loaded four-to-one, on both fixed offensive and flexible defensive guns, to help mitigate the difficulties of aerial gunnery. Tracers were very common on most WWII aircraft, with the exception of night fighters, which needed to be able to attack and shoot down the enemy before they realized they were under attack, and without betraying its own location to the enemy defensive gunners. The United States relied heavily on tracer ammunition for the defensive Browning M2 .50 caliber machine guns on its heavy bombers such as the B-24 Liberator, but they found that during deflection shooting, gunners who tried to aim using the tracers rather than the sights ended up not "leading" the enemy aircraft enough and missing, because of an optical illusion that made it appear that the tracers were striking the aircraft, when in reality they were passing significantly behind it. This proved true of fixed forward firing guns as well. In some cases, gunners were ordered not to use tracer ammunition at all, but in the end, with greater emphasis during training on using the sights and not trusting the tracers, the problem was solved to a large degree.

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