The Coins That Went to War

In 1942, copper was a weapon. So was nickel. Both went into the things that win wars — shell casings, armor plate, the engines of bombers — and suddenly there was not enough to go around.

After Pearl Harbor, the United States threw its whole economy at the war. A new agency, the War Production Board, decided where the country's metal went. Households turned in scrap. Tin cans were saved. Gasoline, sugar, and rubber were rationed. And the question reached all the way down to the smallest thing most people touched every day: the coins in their pockets.

A one-cent piece was 95% copper. A five-cent piece was a quarter nickel. Multiply that by the billions of coins the Mint struck each year, and the money supply itself was hoarding metal the war wanted. So the government did something it almost never does: it changed what coins were made of.

Two coins took the hit — the cent and the nickel — and the fixes were as different as the metals they saved.

The 1943 steel cent. For one year, the penny stopped being copper. The Mint struck cents on blanks of low-carbon steel coated in a thin layer of zinc, so they came out bright and silvery instead of brown. Nearly 1.1 billion were made across all three mints — Philadelphia, Denver, and San Francisco. By the National WWII Museum's count, the copper saved that year was enough for roughly 1.25 million artillery shells.

The public hated them. The steel cents were 13% lighter and magnetic, which jammed the slug-catchers in vending machines. Worse, they were the wrong color — people kept mistaking the shiny cents for dimes. And they rusted: punching the blanks sliced through the protective zinc at the edges, so the bare steel underneath corroded. It was a one-year experiment, and it was not repeated.

The silver war nickel. Nickel the metal was needed for armor and aircraft, so it had to come out of the nickel the coin. On March 27, 1942, Congress authorized a new five-cent alloy with no nickel in it at all — and from October 1942 the Mint struck them in 56% copper, 35% silver, and 9% manganese. For the only time in U.S. history, an everyday circulating coin carried silver that the metal it replaced never had.

To make these silver coins easy to find and pull back after the war, the Mint did something unmistakable. It moved the mint mark — the small letter (P, D, or S) showing which mint struck the coin — to a big, bold position above the dome of Monticello on the back. And for the first time ever, Philadelphia got a mint mark at all: the letter P, which had never appeared on a U.S. coin before. Mint Director Nellie Tayloe Ross spelled out the reason in a letter dated September 14, 1942 — the larger mark, she wrote, would "facilitate identification of the coins when they come in as uncurrent."

This era's coins come in three waves: the change Americans carried during the war, the first coins struck after it as the country exhaled, and the commemoratives that, decades on, were minted to remember it.

Wave one — the wartime change. Reach into an American pocket in 1943 and you'd find a small museum of the war effort. The headline coins are the two the Mint had to rebuild from scratch: Victor David Brenner's Lincoln cent, struck that year in steel, and Felix Schlag's Jefferson nickel, now carrying silver (catalogued here as its own wartime issue, the silver war nickel, alongside the regular Jefferson series). But the rest of the change told the same story more quietly. The Mercury dime and the Walking Liberty half dollar — both by the great sculptor Adolph A. Weinman — kept their prewar 90% silver, as did John Flanagan's Washington silver quarter. Silver was not the metal the war was starving for; copper and nickel were. So the dime, quarter, and half rode through the war almost unchanged, the steady backdrop against which the steel cent and the silver nickel stand out.

That's the thread that ties the wartime coins together: not a style, but a shortage. These coins weren't redesigned for beauty or for a new president — they were re-engineered, mid-war, to free up the exact metals the front lines needed. The cent lost its copper. The nickel lost its nickel. The silver coins were left alone because the war didn't want their metal. Read the era's coinage as a list of materials and you're reading a wartime supply chain.

Wave two — the first coins of the peace. The war's last act on American money came as the fighting ended. President Franklin Roosevelt died in April 1945, and the Mint retired Weinman's beloved Mercury dime to honor him; John R. Sinnock's Roosevelt silver dime arrived in January 1946 — the first new coin of the peace, but unmistakably born from the war that had just ended. That same year the Mint also struck two commemorative half dollars that belong to the immediate aftermath. The Booker T. Washington Memorial half dollar (1946–1951), by Isaac Scott Hathaway — the first Black American on a U.S. coin and the first U.S. coin designed by a Black artist — and the well-run Iowa Centennial half dollar of 1946 by Adam Pietz, the clean program that helped convince Congress to shut the abused commemorative system down. Both are postwar coins, struck by a country turning from war to ordinary life.

Wave three — the coins struck to remember. Half a century later, the country came back to mint the war on purpose. The 1993 World War II 50th Anniversary program — a clad half dollar, a 90% silver dollar (Thomas D. Rogers Sr.'s D-Day design carrying Eisenhower's order to his troops), and a $5 gold half eagle (the only U.S. coin to hide a word in Morse code) — all dual-dated 1991–1995 for the fifty years from America's entry to Japan's surrender, with surcharges that helped build the National WWII Memorial. And in 2020, for 75 years since the war's end, the Mint struck the End of World War II 75th Anniversary $25 gold coin — half an ounce of pure gold, an eagle turning from the arrows of war toward the olive branch of peace, just 7,500 made, sold out fast (obverse by Ronald Sanders, sculpted by Phebe Hemphill; reverse by Donna Weaver, sculpted by Renata Gordon).

These denominations also carry a much longer lineage behind them, and the modern Jefferson nickel reverse by Jamie Franki keeps Schlag's wartime five-cent piece alive in living memory.

Most coins tell you about the year on them. These tell you what the country was fighting for. You can hold a 1943 steel cent and know that the copper it wasn't made of went into shells; you can hold a war nickel and know there's real silver in it because the war needed the nickel more. The history is literally in the metal.

That's the rare combination here: the most famous WWII coins are also some of the most affordable. A worn steel cent or a circulated silver nickel costs very little — a child can start a collection with the same coins that explain a world war. Yet the era also produced some of the great American rarities. During the 1943 changeover, a few leftover copper blanks got struck by mistake — the legendary 1943 copper cent, of which only a small number are confirmed, and one Denver example sold for over $1.7 million. The reverse mistake happened in 1944, when a few leftover steel blanks were struck after the Mint went back to copper — the 1944 steel cent, rarer still.

And the era keeps giving at the design level. The 1993 $5 gold half eagle hides the letter V in Morse code — three dots and a dash — the only U.S. coin known to carry Morse on its face. The 1946 Booker T. Washington half made history twice over: the first Black American on U.S. money, by the first Black artist the Mint ever hired. The 2020 anniversary gold coin turns its eagle deliberately toward the olive branch of peace. So the era rewards both ends of the hobby: a pocketful of wartime change tells the whole story for a few dollars, and around it sit error coins, design firsts, and a sold-out gold issue for the collector who wants to go deep.