5 Dollars - Leonard I Bombing Ploiesti Oil Refineries

Hutt River Province — the micronation declared by Leonard Casley in Western Australia in 1970 after a dispute with the state government over wheat quotas — issued commemorative coinage through the 1980s and 1990s that circulated nowhere but sold readily to collectors. This piece marks Operation Tidal Wave, the August 1, 1943 low-level B-24 raid on the Ploiești refineries in Romania, which at the time supplied roughly a third of Germany's refined oil. The mission was a catastrophe: 53 aircraft lost, five Medals of Honor awarded — more than any single action in American military history.