War Time Set I Put Together With Some Extras

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Take the 'shell casing' determination with a pinch of salt. There is a little controversy about late war cent composition. Google sleuthing will turn up some mixed info.

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My understanding was that most if not all of the recycled brass came from training. (Although I have heard stories from navy sailors who claim that they were detailed to recover the shell casings used in the smaller guns during action. They hated it because before the orders the casings would be jettisoned over the side but now they had to be gathered and kept out of the way during action lest they get underfoot.) Also the cents for these years used recycled shell cases, but they were not made exclusively from shell cases. [1]

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To clarify the information from this twelve year old thread: all 1944 and 1945 pennies are classifiable as "shell case pennies", due to the alloy being used by the mints at the time including (but not entirely made of) recycled shell casing. So it's not a case of there being some 1944 pennies that are, and some that aren't - they're all the same. There's no way to look at a specific penny and say "this one was once a shell case"; the recycled metal got mixed in with metal from other sources, where it all got melted together before being turned into coins. And as noted, the mintages are in the hundreds of millions, so they are by no means scarce. [2]