What is chaff?
In his 398th Timeless Voices Interview (Arthur Laughlin, 398th Pilot – 601st Squadron Video Interview Transcription), Art described chaff as follows: “It is bundles of aluminum strips about a foot long, maybe an inch, inch and a half in diameter. I don’t know how many were in there. It was the radio operator’s job when we got to certain areas (he got briefed where there would be anti-aircraft), to put out a bundle of chaff every certain interval. When these got into the wind stream outside the plane, they would come apart and each of these strips would show on the German radar as a blip for each aluminum strip. They didn’t know where the real planes were. The chaff indicated a lot more planes than there really were. They saved a lot of planes using that.
