My father Lt. Ernest Anders Erickson was awaiting his first combat mission in mid March of 1944. At the time he and the crew were crafting their skills at formation flying and getting a feel of the airfield. They also were taking up repaired ships (B-17s) over the English countryside to determine if they were ready for combat.

Lt. Erickson sent a letter home to his folks and kid sister Dian on March 17th, 1944 from Horham Airfield in England. He wrote many letters home while he was in the Air Corps and most still exist. They are fascinating to read and I have two hundred plus letters and postcards from early 1942 to July of 1945.

He starts the five page letter:


March 17th, 1944
England

Dear Dad, Mom and Dinny,
Still haven't had any mail since I arrived at my new and permanent post. Before I forget, I'm enclosing a piece of metal paper (chaff) the Germans drop to confuse British Radar. I found it outside the barracks.



Attached below is the chaff he found in 1944.

Besides his normal talk of weather, how it was on base and of course his anticipation of flying combat, the "piece of metal paper" caught my eye when I found it in the envelope.

Chaff, originally called Window by the British and Duppel by the German Luftwaffe. It was first developed in the Berlin suburb of Duppel. It is a radar countermeasure in which crewmen on aircraft spread a cloud of small, thin pieces of aluminum, metallic glass fibers or plastic into the air. The chaff appears as a cluster of primary targets on radar screens and swamps the screen with multiple returns, confusing the machinery and it's operator.