How Far Back Can We Go? Second Edition! Ended At 1492 Waiting On 1491

ASLAN, thanks for that additional info.

Steve

Here is a 1943 French 2 Franc coin, issued by the Vichy government of France (which was collaborating with the German occupiers). I believe the French on the obverse says "French State" and the French on the reverse translates to, basically, "Work, Familiy, Country." My French is a bit rusty, but my Spanish and German seem to fill in the missing pieces at times like this, so I think I am right. This phrase on the coin would be in keeping with one of the Nazi German themes of presenting the image that work makes everyone better (as seen also in the slogan ARBEIT MACHT FREI...in essence, "Work makes one free") It is made of aluminum, so I am sure it would float nicely in nalaberong's little flotilla of aluminum coins posted the other day.

For 1943, I am forced to post a Canadian coin! I'm surprised nobody has posted any of this wartime series.

Hey, a brass nickel! Actually, the alloy is called tombac, but the point remains - this is a brass nickel, not a nickel nickel. Why? Well, nickel is an ingredient of stainless steel, and in wartime, stainless steel was much more valuable than silver, so the U.S. just switched out the nickel with useless silver-manganese (insert subtle dig at gold-hoarding preppers here). Even though Canada was the world's largest producer of nickel for many years (thanks to a meteorite that smashed into Sudbury millions of years ago and deposited ample quantities of space-metal), there still wasn't enough to go around, so in 1942 the first brass nickels rolled off the presses. To differentiate the dark brass nickels from dark copper pennies, both round and similar in size, it was decided to give the nickel an unmistakable 12 sides, a tradition that was kept until 1962 (when the collar die maintenance became too expensive).

The first 1942 tombac nickels just had Kruger-Gray's beaver design on them (that guy again?!), but it was realized that a more patriotic design would go over well. The American V-nickels and Churchill's famous "Victory" hand sign combined to create this V-design in 1943, with a flaming torch over a V that stands for both Victory and Five. But as the war raged on, even copper and zinc became in high demand, and so the nickels of 1944 and 1945 were made out of plain steel. Come 1946, we were back to 100% nickel - and there's a good chance that the metal in those nickels came from space (well, technically every metal did, but this was more recent than that).

I am sorry for a duplicate kind of post, but nalaberong shared a lot of info I was not aware of and so I thought I would add a small, but cool feature I enjoy about this coin.

@nalaberong
I learned a lot about the 1943 Canada nickel through your post. I have had this as a favorite since the early 70s. What originally drew me to them is that as a kid I though it cool a secret message was encoded onto its back in Morse Code - mapped out in the included pic is "We Win When We Work Willingly." But I also wonder why they put the beginning of the sentence at the bottom to the left of center rather than centering it at the top?

1942 Canada nickel

here's some for you, Etat Francais 20 Centimes.



So the pictures are not great but the coin is even worse, that is what happens to zinc. Thanks for pointing out the Morse code on the nickel Earle42, and thanks to mysilveryears you can go back to page 24 of this post and see the next time Canada changed the composition for 1951-1954 the composition was steel w/nickel & chromium plating, spanning George VI and Elizabeth II for obverse images, and replacing nickel for a second time since WWII that time for "The Forgotten War", Korea.

EDIT: Silly old Krause, just spent 4 minutes comparing two editions then decided to get the scale 3.5g Thick Flan, thanks for helping narrow down my collection.

Update, well Krause never was too good at Updates, one of my Krause's said thick flan only the other said both were made for '42, love Krause but they can get annoying.