56% copper, 35% silver, 9% maganese . http://www.coinflation.com/coins/1942-1945-Silver-War-Nickel-Value.html why not something else like steel used in the cents....not like they had sophisticated vending machines back then. If they needed the copper so badly as to make steel pennies then why was the nickel still mostly copper ? The nickel was made to be withdrawn from circulation if needed for whatever reason....I never got the logic there, I can see Hawaii banknotes. Why didn't the gov't just make the nickel out of steel for a few years ? and why was the steel cent scrapped after only one year ?
and they figured this out by 1944 ? steel wears more easily than copper ? It takes on an unattractive appearance decades later ( I wasn't around in 1944) but I wouldn't call it wear.
Basically because of the value of silver relative to the expected lifespan of the coin. A war nickel currently has a silver value of 24.71x face. That means $1 of war nickels is worth $24.71 (or thereabout). During production years (1942-1944), silver had a value of 44.8-cents per ounce. Each nickel held 0.0563 or so troy ounces of silver, which means that for ever $1 in silver nickels, the government used 1.1254 troy ounces of silver. So, if silver's spot value exceeded $0.88857, the coins could be pulled from circulation easily.
The actual reason cited was that it was confused for a dime - which I myself have found as I did find one in a dime roll just a couple of weeks ago. They were unpopular from the moment they entered circulation, even with a war going on and lots of other sacrifices the public wasn't willing to tolerate a coin being coloured like a dime but worth a tenth as much. There was even a mini cent shortage going on in 1943 - increased demand because of so much more business especially centered around war production. Then the decision was made to go back to the bronze cent in 1944, and feed the public the notion that soldiers were having to save their scrap shell casings etc to send back to the United States for minting into cents. The public ate it up - but years later the story was determined to be largely farcical. With the war nickels the reason the large mintmarks were placed on the reverse above Monticello was so that the coins could be called, probably after the conclusion of the war, for the recovery of the silver - but in reality it never happened and you can still very occasionally find them in circulation.
Vending machines may not have been sophisticated but the still wanted nickels of the same size and weight as the old ones. A steel nickel of the same size would have been almost 20% lighter. Make them the same diameter and the right weight and they would be 20% thicker. The war nickel alloy used the heavier silver but offset that with the low density Manganese resulting in an alloy of the same density as the 75%copper 25%nickel alloy. Also the electrical properties were close enough that they would work in the pay telephones which were beginning to use electrical property testing to check for slugs/fakes. As to the story about the mint using spent shell cases for the 1944 to 46 cents, this was true. In Roger Burdette's recent book on the experimental cents and five cents of WWII he references the documents in the national archive that report the number of tons of spent shell cases delivered to each of the mints each week. It wasn't enough to produce all the cents struck, but it was enough for a significant amount of them. (My copy of the book is at home or I could give you the tonnage.) I don't believe the shell cases came back from overseas though, just domestic training centers. I have heard stories firsthand though from WWII veterans who claim they were detailed to gather spent cases from combat action.
I was watching Memphis Belle last night. The bomber gunners would be firing a ton of 50 cal rounds(not hitting much) and the shell casings would be scattered in the plane. So for them, and I'd imagine on the ships, it would be pretty easy to collect. For guys in the field, not so much.
