Tracer ammunition, or tracers, are bullets or cannon-caliber projectiles that are built with a small pyrotechnic charge in their base. When fired, the pyrotechnic composition is ignited by the burning powder and burns very brightly, making the projectile trajectory visible to the naked eye during daylight, and very bright during nighttime firing. This allows the shooter to visually trace the trajectory of the projectile and thus make necessary ballistic corrections, without having to confirm projectile impacts and without even using the sights of the weapon. Tracer fire can also be used as a marking tool to signal other shooters to concentrate their fire on a particular target during battle.
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 shooters that their weapons are almost empty. During World War II, aircraft with fixed machine guns or cannons 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. However, this practice similarly alerted astute enemies that their foes were nearly 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, except for night fighters, which needed to be able to attack and shoot down the enemy before they realized they were under attack, and without betraying their 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.