America's Coins Enlist in Battle

These were hard times. America had fortunately survived the its last go-round with World War fewer than twenty-five years earlier, the one touted to be the war to end all wars. It had only proven to be a corner man's respite to allow the bloodied pugilists time to regroup and enter the ring once more.

The nation was in the midst of a great depression where in the words that rang-in Franklin Roosevelt's second term: one third of the nation was ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished. The idyllic calm of a warm Hawaiian day had already been transformed into a vision of bloody carnage as an unforeseen Japanese attack took the lives of over a thousand men in a stroke.

America was off to war. Rationing was the order of the day and that even extended to America's pocket change. The strains of wartime production would require a complete overhaul of the nation's coins in attempt to preserve strategic weapons for the more important goal of national survival.

The Jefferson nickle was the first to sign up. The American five cent piece had not had a ounce of silver in it since the necessities of a prior bloody conflict, the American Civil war, had forced the US to replace the silver half-dime that had served since 1792 with a new five-cent piece largely copper with a small amount of nickle that gave it its characteristic silvery appearance.

But the old silver half-dime would not return. Its small size had always rendered it somewhat problematic, and besides silver was worth quite a bit more now than it had been during the boom years when American silver mines were running full blast. And then there was the inherent conservatism of the American people. Their grandfathers, fathers and themselves had always spent the nickle, so by gum we would have a nickle again, even if no nickle was in it.

Its new replacement would substitute a manganese, copper, silver blend for the original nickle.

Ironically, as nickle and copper became precious as metals of war, the coin that had originated as a cheap metallic substitute for silver was replaced by a silver alloy coin. But this coin would not be coined from 900 fine silver as its predecessor silver-half dime had been. The new alloy contained a mere 35% silver, 56% copper and 9% manganese. This coin series ran from 1942 to 1946 and can be distinguished from other Jefferson nickles by the placement of a large mint-mark over Monticello in the reverse of the coin, and a greyish tinge that the coins acquire when weathered.

According to Gary Eggleston, Bellaonline's Coin editor, nickles struck on blanks of the wrong metal were produced during these years. The rare coins can be identified by dropping a coin on a counter top and listening for its ring. The tone emitted by a nickles struck on the standard copper nickle blank varies from that produced by the war nickel.

The lowly penny was the next to sign up for war duty. Because copper was a strategic metal, the US mint in 1943 rolled out its replacement-a steel cent without a single shred of copper. Although the steel cent was galvanized with a coating of zinc, the appearance of the gray-blue penny proved jarring and the protection inadequate to protect against the elements.

Therefore in 1944 the mint rolled out its replacement. The 1944 series returned America to a penny that looked like a penny by substituting bronze cadged from melted shell cases. Except for a smidgen of difference in the tin content they were identical to that used in the indian head pennies of gramp's day. Some 1943 pennies are known to have been struck in error on copper blanks, but these are extremely rare.

Like Rosie the Riveter, American coins were called to service and they answered.

Sources: http://www.bellaonline.com/articles/art25139.asp