Coast Guard landing craft pushing through heavy surf, one of the armed-forces stamps issued at the close of World War II.

TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS

• Catalog Number: Scott #936

• Denomination: 3 cents (3¢)

• Date of Issue: November 10, 1945

• Printing Method: Rotary Press, Engraved (Intaglio)

• Perforation: 11 × 10½

• Color: Bright Blue Green

• Subject: Coast Guard landing craft and a supply ship, honoring Coast Guard service in World War II

• Format: Commemorative single, Armed Forces series

CONDITION ANALYSIS (Seller-Assessed)

• Status: Used

• Grading: Fine

• Postmark: Black machine postmark of parallel wavy lines running across the design. The landing craft and supply ship design as well as the inscriptions remain clearly readable.

• Obverse: The landing craft in surf, the supply ship behind, the dates, the country inscription, and the denomination are all identifiable.

• Reverse: No original gum present, as expected for a used stamp. The paper shows light toning and a small dark spot near the center, with no tears or thinning visible.

• Centering / Margins: The design is well framed with slight shifts leftward and downward.

• Perforations: Intact on all four sides.

HISTORY

At the end of World War II the Post Office issued a set of stamps honoring the branches of the armed forces, and this three-cent value went to the Coast Guard, the smallest and often least visible of the services. The dates on the design, 1790 and 1945, reach back to the founding of the Revenue Cutter Service under Alexander Hamilton, the seagoing customs fleet that grew into the modern Coast Guard.

The wartime Coast Guard did far more than patrol the coastline. Its crews manned landing craft in nearly every major amphibious assault of the war, ferrying troops onto hostile beaches in the Pacific and at Normandy under fire, exactly the kind of scene this stamp depicts. Coast Guardsmen also escorted convoys, hunted submarines, and ran rescue operations for torpedoed ships, work that cost lives and rarely made headlines.

Issued November 10, 1945, in bright blue green, the stamp gave that service its due just months after the war ended. The choice to show a landing craft crashing through surf, rather than a portrait or an emblem, captures the Coast Guard's real wartime role: getting other men safely to the fight, through whatever the sea threw at them.

STEVEN SAYS

People forget the Coast Guard was in the thick of it during the war, driving the landing craft that put troops on the beaches at Normandy and across the Pacific. The 1790 date ties it all the way back to Hamilton's revenue cutters. I like that the stamp shows the boats working the surf instead of a tidy emblem.