![]() 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. However, this practice similarly alerted astute enemies that their foes were nearly out of ammunition. 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. Tracers are also sometimes placed two or three rounds from the bottom of magazines to alert shooters that their weapons are almost empty. 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. When used, tracers are usually loaded as every fifth round in machine gun belts, referred to as four-to-one tracer. Tracer fire can also be used as a marking tool to signal other shooters to concentrate their fire on a particular target during battle. This allows the shooter to visually trace the flight path of the projectile and thus make necessary ballistic corrections, without having to confirm projectile impacts and without even using the sights of the weapon. 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. Tracer ammunition (AMO) (Tracers) are bullets or cannon-caliber projectiles that are built with a small pyrotechnic charge in their base. Illuminated pyrotechnic ammunition visible in daylight and darkness Tracer ammunition fired by United States military captured in a long-exposure photograph of a Japanese attack on Peleliu, 1944
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