The Jefferson Wartime Nickel — when the nickel held no nickel

In the spring of 1942, the metal that gave the nickel its name was suddenly worth more in a factory than in your pocket. Nickel is hard, it resists heat, and it makes steel tougher — exactly what a country building aircraft engines, armor plate, and warships needs. So the United States decided its five-cent coin would have to give the metal back.

On March 27, 1942, Congress authorized a new alloy. The Mint dropped the nickel metal almost entirely and reached for an unlikely substitute: silver. The wartime coin became 56% copper, 35% silver, and 9% manganese — the first silver in a U.S. five-cent piece since the old silver half dime ended in 1873. The first coins in the new alloy were struck that autumn.

There was a practical problem hiding inside the patriotic one. These silver coins looked almost exactly like ordinary nickels, and one day the war would end and the Treasury would want to redeem the silver. How do you pull a few hundred million near-identical coins back out of a nation's coffee cans and cash drawers? The Mint's answer is the thing collectors point to first.

The coin itself was already four years old. The obverse — the heads side — carries a left-facing portrait of Thomas Jefferson, the third U.S. president, modeled on a famous Gilbert Stuart painting. The reverse — the tails side — shows Monticello, Jefferson's Virginia home, straight on. Both sides are the work of Felix Schlag, a German-born sculptor who beat out hundreds of other entrants to win the Mint's 1938 design competition and its $1,000 prize. It remained his only adopted coin design.

What makes a wartime nickel is not the picture but the mintmark — the small letter telling you which mint struck the coin. On a normal Jefferson nickel that letter sits small and quiet beside Monticello's steps. On the war nickels the Mint blew it up into a large letter floating above Monticello's dome, impossible to miss. That oversized mark was a flag for the future: a signal to sorters that this coin held silver and should be set aside.

It came with a genuine first. Philadelphia, which had struck coins without any mintmark for 150 years, added a "P" above the dome — the first time the Philadelphia Mint's own letter ever appeared on a United States coin. For three years, then, every war nickel announced its home: P, D (Denver), or S (San Francisco), each one large and high on the reverse.

The war nickel is one of the friendliest sets in American coins to start — every date and mint is affordable, and even a worn one carries real silver. The challenge, and the fun, is in the edges of the set.

The 1943/2-P overdate is the star. A 1942-dated die was pressed back into service and re-dated for 1943, leaving a faint "2" peeking out from under the "3." It is the only overdate in the entire Jefferson nickel series, which makes it the variety collectors hunt hardest. Sharp, high-grade examples are genuinely scarce; one PCGS MS67 with Full Steps brought $16,675 at a Heritage auction in 2008. Two more 1943-P die varieties — a doubled-die obverse and the "doubled eye" — keep variety specialists busy, and a 1945-P doubled-die reverse rounds out the famous list.

Then there is the matter of strike. Look at the base of Monticello: those little steps are notoriously soft, because tired dies and a stubborn alloy often left them mushy. A coin where five (or six) steps stand crisp and unbroken earns the "Full Steps" designation — and on some war-nickel dates a true Full Steps coin in high grade is far rarer than the raw mintage would suggest. That single detail separates a common date from a condition rarity.

One last historical footnote that collectors love: the war nickels are the only Jefferson nickels you can melt for their metal, and during and after the war huge numbers were hoarded and pulled from circulation precisely for the silver inside. The ones that survived in pristine, never-spent condition are the ones worth chasing.