1 Cent Davis-Monthan PoW Camp

Davis-Monthan Army Air Field, outside Tucson, held Axis prisoners — primarily German and Italian — under the Geneva Convention framework that required the U.S. to provide canteen access for PoW labor earnings. These scrip issues were the mechanism: prisoners received pay for their work but in currency unusable outside the wire, preventing any utility if they escaped or smuggled it out.

The Tucson area camps were among the more extensive in the Southwest, drawing on wartime agricultural labor demand. Camp-issued scrip at this denomination is genuinely scarce; most was redeemed and destroyed at war's end per standard demobilization procedure.