I picked up a '42D 6P & '44S 1F (IIRC) coins over the weekend. Can anyone give me some references/background as per why the US minted these coins? I did a general internet & CT search & found nothing. Thanks for your help.
I would assume it was just because of the war and maybe there was a shortage of silver in Australia at the time. With Australia being so far from most other nations and being isolated from its trading partners, the U.S. was a natural nation to fill the void. I think the U.S. made coins for the Netherlands East Indies in 1941 also for the same reason.
I thought so as well, but if you look at mintage figures, there were as many if not more coins minted in Australia itself (Melbourne) than in San Francisco or Denver (for the Florin & Shilling), and many more than in prior years. This is different than the Netherlands East Indies, where the Netherlands itself was occupied & (I would think) they did not have an exclusive mint for the area.
That's a good point. Maybe they needed more coins than usual with the additional economic activity due to the war? I know a lot of American troops were stationed there in 1942. I'm just speculating though. It would be good to hear from someone who knows.
Australian coins from that era are fascinating because they were minted all over the place, wherever the Australian government could get a good contract. So they were minted in Britain in London and Heaton, a couple of Indian mints, several mints in Australia and then of course the USA. The logistics of getting coins from Britain during that time practically made getting coins from there impossible due to the U-boat attacks in the North Atlantic. A shipment of paper for India's Reserve Bank was sunk by a U-Boat and the paper was not recovered until much later after the war. So coins were minted in Canberra, Perth and Sydney in Australia; Bombay, Calcutta in India, London and Heaton in Britain; Denver and San Francisco in the USA. In addition to mintmarks as usual, they used dots, seraphs etc to denote different mints. Years ago I bought several hundred Ozzie pennies from 1912-64 and it was fascinating to go through and determine all the different places they were minted.
