155 Fun Facts About 1940s

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor took place on which date?

Japan struck Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941; Roosevelt called it 'a date which will live in infamy' in his address to Congress the next day, and the US declared war on Japan within hours.

The D-Day landings in Normandy took place on which date in 1944?

The Allies landed in Normandy on 6 June 1944; the assault phase, codenamed Operation Neptune within Operation Overlord, put roughly 156,000 troops ashore on five beaches that day.

Victory in Europe Day, marking Germany's unconditional surrender, is celebrated on which date?

Germany's surrender took effect on 8 May 1945, marked as VE Day; the definitive document was signed at Karlshorst, Berlin, late that evening, after midnight Moscow time, so Russia marks 9 May.

The first nuclear device ever detonated, the Trinity test, took place in July 1945 in which state?

Trinity was fired on 16 July 1945 in the Jornada del Muerto desert of New Mexico, on the Alamogordo Bombing Range; the implosion-type plutonium device was designed at Los Alamos under Robert Oppenheimer.

The United Nations officially came into existence on 24 October of which year?

The charter had been drafted at a San Francisco conference that spring; the first General Assembly met in London in January 1946 with 51 nations.

The Marshall Plan, officially the European Recovery Program, began operating in April of which year?

It replaced the harsher Morgenthau Plan and ran for four years before the Mutual Security Act largely superseded it in 1951.

The Berlin Airlift, which supplied West Berlin during the Soviet blockade, began in June of which year?

The blockade ran from 24 June 1948 to 12 May 1949; the airlift itself continued until September 1949.

Which newspaper printed the famous wrong headline 'Dewey Defeats Truman' in November 1948?

The Chicago Daily Tribune, a Republican-leaning paper that had once called Truman a 'nincompoop', ran the headline in its early edition; Truman gleefully held up a copy at St. Louis Union Station.

Historians often date the Cold War's start to Truman's March 1947 speech pledging aid to which two countries?

On 12 March 1947 Truman asked Congress for $400 million in aid to Greece and Turkey, arguing that without help both could fall into the Soviet orbit.

How many individual defendants did the 1945-46 Nuremberg trials of major Nazi leaders try?

Twenty-four men were indicted but 22 were tried: Robert Ley killed himself before the trial and Gustav Krupp was ruled unfit, while Martin Bormann was tried in absentia. Twelve were sentenced to death.

The State of Israel was proclaimed at the Tel Aviv Museum on which date?

David Ben-Gurion read the declaration on 14 May 1948, hours before the British Mandate expired at midnight; armies of neighbouring Arab states invaded the next day.

The Zoot Suit Riots of June 1943 between servicemen and young Mexican Americans took place in which city?

The riots broke out in Los Angeles in early June 1943, with servicemen attacking young Mexican Americans in zoot suits that critics called a waste of rationed wool; Detroit and Beaumont saw race riots the same month.

Most US wartime rationing ended in August 1945, but rationing of which item lingered into 1946?

Sugar was the last rationed US staple, remaining on ration until June 1947; gasoline and canned goods were freed within days of Japan's surrender, and meat and shoes by the end of 1945.

The Pentagon was dedicated in January of which year, only 16 months after ground was broken?

The Pentagon was dedicated on 15 January 1943; ground had been broken on 11 September 1941, and the building was occupied in stages while work continued on its five rings.

Sculptor Gutzon Borglum's work on Mount Rushmore, begun in 1927, was completed in which year?

His son Lincoln finished the job after Gutzon died that March. Borglum called it the Shrine of Democracy.

Jackie Robinson broke Major League Baseball's colour line at first base for which team on April 15, 1947?

The Brooklyn Dodgers' general manager Branch Rickey had scouted him from the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro leagues.

The first post-war Summer Olympics, the 'Austerity Games' of 1948, were held in which city?

London stepped in at short notice and built no new venues, housing athletes in RAF camps and colleges; 59 nations took part, with Germany and Japan not invited and the Soviet Union absent.

Which aircraft was Chuck Yeager flying when he broke the sound barrier on October 14, 1947?

Yeager's rocket-powered Bell X-1, which he named Glamorous Glennis after his wife, was dropped from a B-29 over the Mojave Desert and passed Mach 1 in level flight at about 43,000 feet.

Thor Heyerdahl's 1947 Kon-Tiki expedition crossed the Pacific on a raft built mainly from what?

Kon-Tiki was lashed together from nine balsa logs cut in Ecuador and built at Callao, Peru, copying rafts described by the conquistadors, to test whether South Americans could have reached Polynesia.

The debris found near Roswell in 1947 came from a balloon train belonging to which secret programme?

Project Mogul flew trains of balloons carrying microphones to listen for the sound of Soviet nuclear tests; the army's 'weather balloon' cover story fed decades of UFO theories.

ENIAC, the first programmable electronic general-purpose computer, was dedicated in February 1946 at which university?

The University of Pennsylvania's machine cost $487,000 and was dubbed a 'Giant Brain' by the press; it had already been put to practical work in December 1945.

The first working transistor was built in 1947 at which research laboratory?

John Bardeen and Walter Brattain demonstrated the point-contact transistor at Bell Labs in December 1947; they shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics with William Shockley.

Percy Spencer's Raytheon 'Radarange', the first commercial microwave oven, went on sale in which year?

Spencer, a self-taught engineer from Maine, had discovered the heating effect by accident in 1945 while working with radar magnetrons.

Edwin Land's company created the first instant camera, the Land Camera, in which year?

The company was Polaroid, originally founded to exploit Land's polarising polymer.

At which Philadelphia department store was the Slinky first demonstrated in November 1945?

Naval engineer Richard James demonstrated the Slinky on an inclined plane at Gimbels in November 1945 and sold all 400 units in about 90 minutes; the toy came from a torsion spring he saw fall off a shelf.

Earl Tupper, a former DuPont chemist, created the first Tupperware product in which year?

He made it in Leominster, Massachusetts. The home party sales model that made it famous came later, in the 1950s.

Louis Réard's 1946 swimsuit was named the bikini after an atoll where what had just happened?

Rival designer Jacques Heim had launched the 'Atome' two months earlier, billed as the smallest swimsuit in the world.

General Mills launched Cheerios in 1941 under what original name?

The cereal debuted as Cheerioats in 1941 and became Cheerios in 1945 after Quaker Oats objected to the use of 'oats' in the name.

Swiss engineer George de Mestral conceived the hook-and-loop fastener he named Velcro in which year?

The idea came from burrs sticking to his dog; his breakthrough was thinking of hook-and-eye closures at a tiny scale. Weavers in Lyon initially rejected it.

Candy Land was designed in 1948 by schoolteacher Eleanor Abbott while she recovered from which illness?

Polio put Abbott in a San Diego hospital, where she created the game for children on the ward; Milton Bradley published it in 1949 as a stopgap beside its school-supplies line.

The murder-mystery board game Cluedo was first manufactured in 1949 by which British company?

Anthony Pratt devised the game in Birmingham during the war and sold it to Waddingtons of Leeds, which released it in 1949; Parker Brothers published it in North America as Clue.

Silly Putty is generally said to have been first made in 1943 by an engineer working for which company?

James Wright at General Electric's New Haven lab made the bouncing putty in 1943 while seeking a synthetic rubber; marketer Peter Hodgson packaged it in plastic eggs and launched it as a toy in 1950.

The planned suburb of Levittown, New York, was built between 1947 and 1951 for whom?

Levitt & Sons built more than 17,000 houses for returning WWII veterans, who could buy with little or no down payment on GI Bill loans; the assembly-line methods made the name shorthand for post-war suburbia.

The post-war baby boom in the US is generally dated from 1946 to which year?

The exact boundaries are debated, but 1946–1964 is the standard definition of the boomer generation.

Casablanca, released in 1942, was directed by whom?

Michael Curtiz directed Casablanca for Warner Bros., which had bought the unproduced play Everybody Comes to Rick's in January 1942; Curtiz won the Best Director Oscar for it in March 1944.

Citizen Kane (1941) was the first feature film directed by whom?

Orson Welles built Charles Foster Kane as a composite of William Randolph Hearst, Joseph Pulitzer and Chicago tycoons Samuel Insull and Harold McCormick.

How did It's a Wonderful Life (1946) perform at the box office on its original release?

The film was a box-office disappointment, losing money on its $3.18 million budget despite five Oscar nominations; it became a Christmas staple only after its copyright lapsed in 1974 and TV stations aired it freely.

Which 1946 William Wyler film about returning veterans won seven Oscars, including one for amputee Harold Russell?

The Best Years of Our Lives won seven Oscars including Best Picture; Fredric March took Best Actor and Harold Russell, who lost both hands in the war, won Best Supporting Actor plus an honorary award the same night.

Disney's Fantasia (1940) set its animation to classical pieces conducted by whom, mostly with the Philadelphia Orchestra?

Leopold Stokowski conducted all eight segments, seven performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra; the film also pioneered the Fantasound stereo system.

Bugs Bunny's definitive characterisation debuted in 1940 in which Tex Avery cartoon?

A Wild Hare (July 1940) gave Bugs his grey design, Brooklyn voice and 'What's up, Doc?'; a rougher prototype rabbit had appeared in Porky's Hare Hunt in 1938.

Bing Crosby's 'White Christmas', the best-selling physical single ever, came from which 1942 film?

Crosby introduced Irving Berlin's 'White Christmas' in Holiday Inn, a 1942 musical built around a Connecticut inn open only on holidays; the song won the Oscar for Best Original Song and his recording sold over 50 million copies.

Glenn Miller's 'Chattanooga Choo Choo' holds what distinction in recording history?

RCA Victor presented Miller with a gold-lacquered copy in February 1942 to mark 1.2 million sales, the first gold record ever awarded; the song came from his first film, Sun Valley Serenade.

In the early 1940s Frank Sinatra became the idol of screaming teenage fans known by what nickname?

The bobby soxers, named for their ankle socks, mobbed Sinatra's Paramount Theatre shows from December 1942; he had joined Harry James's band in 1939 for $75 a week before signing with Columbia in 1943.

Which 1941 Andrews Sisters hit from Buck Privates was nominated for the Best Song Oscar?

'Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy', about a Chicago trumpeter drafted into the army, was sung by the Minneapolis trio in Buck Privates (1941) and nominated for Best Song; Bette Midler revived it in 1973.

Charlie Parker was a leading figure in which fast, harmonically complex 1940s jazz style?

Bebop grew out of after-hours jam sessions in New York in the early 1940s, where Parker played alongside Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk.

George Orwell's Animal Farm was first published in England in August of which year?

Publisher Fredric Warburg had accepted it in July 1944, but paper shortages and reluctance to offend the Soviet ally delayed it.

Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four was published on 8 June of which year?

It was his ninth and final completed book; he died of tuberculosis in January 1950.

Anne Frank's diary was first published in Amsterdam in 1947 under what title?

Contact published Het Achterhuis ('The Annex', literally 'the back house') on 25 June 1947; Miep Gies had saved the pages and gave them to Otto Frank, the family's only survivor.

How many performances did Death of a Salesman run after its February 1949 Broadway premiere?

The original production ran 742 performances at the Morosco Theatre, closing in November 1950; it won both the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Tony Award for Best Play in 1949.

Wonder Woman first appeared in October 1941 in which comic?

Wonder Woman debuted in a backup story in All Star Comics #8, on sale in October 1941, created by psychologist William Moulton Marston; she took the cover of Sensation Comics #1 in January 1942.

Joe Simon said he created Captain America by first choosing whom as 'the best villain of them all'?

Simon said he picked Adolf Hitler as the villain first and built the hero to fight him; Captain America punches Hitler on the cover of Captain America Comics #1, cover-dated March 1941, months before the US entered the war.

The Battle of Britain takes its name from a speech Churchill gave to the Commons on which date?

In his 'finest hour' speech of 18 June 1940, four days before France signed an armistice, Churchill told the Commons: 'the Battle of France is over. I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin.'

The Battle of Britain in 1940 was the first major military campaign fought entirely by what?

Air forces alone: the RAF and Fleet Air Arm defended Britain against the Luftwaffe.

What was the codename of the Dunkirk evacuation?

Operation Dynamo, directed from the tunnels beneath Dover Castle by Vice-Admiral Bertram Ramsay, ran from 26 May to 4 June 1940 and used destroyers, cross-Channel ferries and the famous 'little ships'.

Roughly how many Allied soldiers were evacuated from Dunkirk in 1940?

Operation Dynamo lifted more than 338,000 Allied soldiers off the beaches and mole at Dunkirk between 26 May and 4 June 1940, far beyond the 45,000 first hoped for; the first 'little ships' arrived on 28 May.

Which German formation was destroyed at the Battle of Stalingrad?

Hitler refused Paulus's request to surrender; the defeat turned the tide on the Eastern Front.

What is the modern name of the city of Stalingrad?

Stalingrad was renamed Volgograd in 1961 during Khrushchev's de-Stalinisation; the city had been Tsaritsyn until 1925 and takes its present name from the Volga.

On what dates in 1942 was the Battle of Midway fought?

The battle ran from 4 to 7 June 1942, six months after Pearl Harbor; US codebreakers had identified Midway as the target, letting Nimitz ambush Nagumo's carrier force.

What was the operational designation of the American invasion of Iwo Jima?

Operation Detachment began with the landings of 19 February 1945; the five-week fight for the island's airfields, ending 26 March, cost nearly 7,000 American dead.

Which Associated Press photographer took the famous flag-raising picture on Iwo Jima?

Joe Rosenthal of the Associated Press shot the second flag-raising on Mount Suribachi on 23 February 1945; the photograph won the Pulitzer Prize for Photography that same year.

What was the name of the enriched-uranium bomb dropped on Hiroshima?

Little Boy, a gun-type bomb using enriched uranium, was dropped on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945; Fat Man, a plutonium implosion weapon, fell on Nagasaki three days later.

The B-29 Enola Gay was named after whose mother?

Pilot Paul Tibbets had the name of his mother, Enola Gay Tibbets, painted on the B-29 the day before the mission; it took off from Tinian at 02:45 on 6 August 1945.

What was the codename of the 9–10 March 1945 incendiary raid on Tokyo?

Operation Meetinghouse sent 279 B-29s over Tokyo with incendiaries on the night of 9–10 March 1945, burning about 16 square miles and killing roughly 100,000 people, the deadliest air raid of the war.

Which Army general directed the Manhattan Project from 1942 to 1946?

Brigadier General Leslie Groves, who had just overseen the Pentagon's construction, took charge of the Manhattan Project in September 1942; J. Robert Oppenheimer ran the Los Alamos laboratory under him.

What was the Manhattan Project's British counterpart, which it absorbed?

Tube Alloys, the British bomb programme set up in 1941 after the MAUD Committee's report, was merged into the American effort under the Quebec Agreement of August 1943.

What was the Manhattan Project's original codename before it took the Manhattan District name?

The Army Corps of Engineers set it up in June 1942 as the 'Development of Substitute Materials' project, a name soon judged too revealing; the Manhattan District label came from its first headquarters at 270 Broadway.

What share of the Bletchley Park codebreaking workforce were women?

Women made up about 75% of Bletchley Park's roughly 10,000 staff by 1945, many of them Wrens operating the Bombe machines that helped break the German Enigma and Lorenz ciphers.

Which organisation was based at Bletchley Park during World War II?

The Government Code and Cypher School moved to Bletchley Park in August 1939 and became GCHQ in 1946; its Ultra work stayed secret until F. W. Winterbotham's 1974 book.

How many B-25 bombers took part in the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo in April 1942?

16 B-25 Mitchells, each with a five-man crew, took off on 18 April 1942 and bombed Tokyo and other cities; fifteen crash-landed or were abandoned over China and one landed in the Soviet Union.

From which aircraft carrier did the Doolittle Raid launch?

The bombers launched from USS Hornet on 18 April 1942, about 650 miles from Japan, after a picket boat spotted the task force; Doolittle was promoted two grades to brigadier general and received the Medal of Honor.

The Yalta Conference of February 1945 was held in which palaces?

Roosevelt stayed and the plenary sessions met at the Livadia Palace; Stalin used the Yusupov Palace at Koreiz and Churchill the Vorontsov Palace at Alupka, all on Crimea's southern coast.

Which two British prime ministers attended the Potsdam Conference in 1945?

Winston Churchill attended with Clement Attlee as opposition leader; when the delayed election count on 26 July gave Labour a landslide, Attlee returned as prime minister for the final sessions.

The Potsdam Conference of July–August 1945 met in which palace?

The Cecilienhof, a mock-Tudor palace completed for Crown Prince Wilhelm in 1917, hosted Truman, Stalin, Churchill and then Attlee from 17 July to 2 August 1945, because central Berlin lay in ruins.

On what date did Franklin D. Roosevelt die in office?

Roosevelt died of a cerebral haemorrhage at Warm Springs, Georgia, on April 12, 1945, while sitting for a portrait; he had returned from the Yalta Conference only two months earlier.

For how many days had FDR's final vice president held the office when Roosevelt died?

Harry Truman had been vice president for just 82 days, since the inauguration of January 20, 1945, and had met Roosevelt privately only twice; he learned of the atomic bomb only after taking office.

Whom did Roosevelt and Truman defeat in the 1944 presidential election?

It was Roosevelt's weakest performance in his four elections, though still a landslide.

Which British party leader became prime minister in 1945 and launched the National Health Service?

Clement Attlee led Labour to a landslide in July 1945 and his government founded the NHS in 1948; he led the party from 1935 to 1955 and had been mayor of Stepney.

Whom did Attlee appoint as Health Minister to build the NHS after the 1945 election?

Aneurin Bevan, the Welsh ex-miner Attlee made Minister of Health, steered the National Health Service Act through Parliament in 1946 and launched the service on 5 July 1948, after winning over consultants by, he said, 'stuffing their mouths with gold'.

Where was the NHS officially launched in 1948?

Bevan symbolically received the keys at Park Hospital in Davyhulme, near Manchester, on 5 July 1948, the day the NHS began; the hospital was renamed Trafford General in 1988.

Which two provinces of British India were divided at partition in 1947?

Bengal and Punjab were each split along religious lines, producing East Pakistan and West Bengal in the east and West and East Punjab in the west; both dominions came into being at midnight on 14–15 August 1947.

What was the boundary of partition between India and Pakistan called?

The Radcliffe Line was drawn in five weeks by barrister Cyril Radcliffe, who had never been to India; it was published on 17 August 1947, two days after independence, amid horrific communal violence.

Who assassinated Mahatma Gandhi on 30 January 1948?

Nathuram Godse, a Hindu nationalist from Pune, fired three shots at point-blank range at Birla House in New Delhi; he was hanged in November 1949 with co-conspirator Narayan Apte.

How old was Gandhi when he was assassinated?

Gandhi was 78, born on 2 October 1869 in Porbandar; he was walking to an evening multi-faith prayer meeting in the garden of Birla House when he was shot.

How large was the 1944 Bretton Woods gathering at the Mount Washington Hotel?

730 delegates from 44 Allied nations met from 1 to 22 July 1944 and set up the IMF and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the core of the World Bank.

Which two economists independently shaped the ideas behind the Bretton Woods system?

Keynes worked at the British Treasury and White at the US Treasury.

Which veterans' organization led the drafting of the 1944 G.I. Bill?

The American Legion drafted the bill, with former national commander Harry Colmery writing the first draft on Mayflower Hotel stationery; former Illinois governor John Stelle chaired the Legion committee that pushed it through Congress.

What was the formal name of the first G.I. Bill?

The Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944, signed by Roosevelt on June 22, 1944, paid for college or vocational training, guaranteed home loans and gave a year of unemployment pay to returning veterans.

The 1947 Taft-Hartley Act became law over the veto of which president?

Congress overrode Harry Truman's veto on 23 June 1947; Truman had called the act a 'slave-labor bill', but it curbed union power after the strike waves of 1945 and 1946.

Which GPO telephone engineer designed the Colossus codebreaking computer?

Tommy Flowers built Colossus at the Post Office research station at Dollis Hill, partly with his own money; Turing, often wrongly credited, had designed the earlier electromechanical Bombe.

Colossus was built to help break which German code system?

Colossus attacked the Lorenz SZ40/42 teleprinter cipher, which Bletchley called Tunny, used for Hitler's high-command links; the Mark 1 was working at Dollis Hill by December 1943.

Whose Z3, completed in Berlin in 1941, was the first electromechanical computer?

Konrad Zuse completed the Z3 in Berlin in May 1941 using about 2,600 telephone relays; it was destroyed in a 1943 air raid, and Zuse's company later built the Z4.

Alfred Kinsey, author of the 1948 report on male sexual behavior, was a zoologist where?

Kinsey taught zoology at Indiana University in Bloomington, where he had spent two decades studying gall wasps before founding its Institute for Sex Research in 1947; the 1948 report drew on some 5,300 interviews with men.

Which record label introduced the 33 1/3 rpm LP in 1948?

Columbia Records unveiled the 12-inch 33 1/3 rpm microgroove LP, developed by Peter Goldmark's team, in June 1948; RCA Victor countered in 1949 with the 7-inch 45 rpm single.

Which Swiss chemist won the 1948 Nobel Prize for discovering DDT's insecticidal action?

Paul Hermann Müller of Geigy in Basel found DDT's insecticidal power in 1939 and won the 1948 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine; Othmar Zeidler had first synthesised the compound in 1874.

Which three scientists shared the 1945 Nobel Prize for the development of penicillin?

Alexander Fleming, who found the mould in 1928, shared the 1945 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Howard Florey and Ernst Chain, whose Oxford team turned it into a usable drug in 1940–41.

The Vespa scooter, launched in 1946, was made by which Italian company?

Piaggio, whose Pontedera plant had built bombers before the war, launched the Vespa ('wasp') in April 1946, designed by aeronautical engineer Corradino D'Ascanio.

How many consecutive games did Joe DiMaggio hit safely in during his 1941 streak?

DiMaggio hit safely in 56 straight games from May 15 to July 16, 1941; two fine plays by Cleveland third baseman Ken Keltner helped end the streak on July 17.

How many World Series championships did the Yankees win during Joe DiMaggio's 13-year career?

Only Yogi Berra, with ten rings, has more.

Ted Williams played his entire 19-year career, interrupted by two wars, for which team?

The Boston Red Sox had him from 1939 to 1960; service in World War II and Korea interrupted the career, and he finished with a .344 average.

Which 1948 Triple Crown winner was the first racehorse to earn US$1 million?

He won 16 consecutive stakes races for Calumet Farm.

How many consecutive title defenses did heavyweight champion Joe Louis win?

Louis made 25 successful defences between August 1937 and his retirement in March 1949, including the 1938 first-round knockout of Max Schmeling; he held the title for eleven years and eight months.

How many gold medals did Fanny Blankers-Koen win at the 1948 London Olympics?

The 30-year-old mother of two was nicknamed 'the Flying Housewife'.

The NBA was created in August 1949 by merging the NBL with which league?

The Basketball Association of America, founded in June 1946 by arena owners, absorbed the National Basketball League on 3 August 1949 to form the NBA, which dates its own history from the BAA's founding.

Which Canadian team hosted the New York Knickerbockers in what the NBA calls its first game, in 1946?

The Toronto Huskies, one of the BAA's eleven original franchises, lost 68–66 to the Knickerbockers at Maple Leaf Gardens on November 1, 1946; the team folded after that single season.

How many performances did the original Broadway run of Oklahoma! achieve after opening in 1943?

Oklahoma! ran for 2,212 performances at the St. James Theatre from March 1943 to May 1948, then a Broadway record for a musical; Rodgers and Hammerstein received a special Pulitzer Prize in 1944.

Oklahoma! was based on which 1931 play by Lynn Riggs?

Green Grow the Lilacs, set outside Claremore in Indian Territory in 1906, ran briefly on Broadway in 1931 for the Theatre Guild, which later commissioned the musical; its title comes from a folk song.

Rodgers and Hammerstein's 1949 musical was based on which Pulitzer-winning 1947 book by James Michener?

Tales of the South Pacific, Michener's linked stories from his navy service, won the 1948 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction; South Pacific opened in April 1949 and ran for 1,925 performances.

Rebecca (1940) was Alfred Hitchcock's first film under contract with which producer?

David O. Selznick brought Hitchcock to Hollywood on a seven-year contract; Rebecca, his first American film, starred Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine and won Selznick the 1940 Best Picture Oscar.

How Green Was My Valley (1941) tells the story of a mining family from which country?

The Morgans are a Welsh coal-mining family in the South Wales valleys; John Ford's film of Richard Llewellyn's 1939 novel beat Citizen Kane to the Best Picture Oscar.

In Felix Salten's original book, what kind of animal was Bambi?

Salten's 1923 novel Bambi, a Life in the Woods made Bambi a roe deer in a European forest; Disney switched him to a white-tailed deer, more familiar to American audiences.

Disney's Dumbo (1941) was made to recoup losses from which two earlier films?

Pinocchio and Fantasia, both released in 1940, lost money after the war closed European markets; Dumbo was made cheaply and quickly at 64 minutes and turned a profit for Disney.

Which novelist co-wrote the screenplay of Double Indemnity (1944) with Billy Wilder?

Raymond Chandler, then a novelist with no screen experience, co-wrote the script with Billy Wilder, who found him difficult; the story came from James M. Cain's novella serialized in Liberty magazine in 1936.

Under what title was Miracle on 34th Street initially released in the United Kingdom?

Britain released it as The Big Heart; Fox chief Darryl Zanuck had opened it in the US in May 1947 to catch summer audiences, and Edmund Gwenn won Best Supporting Actor as Kris Kringle.

Which film beat Miracle on 34th Street to the 1947 Best Picture Oscar?

Elia Kazan's Gentleman's Agreement, about a reporter posing as Jewish to expose antisemitism, won Best Picture and Director; Miracle on 34th Street took three Oscars, including Original Story and Screenplay.

Which 1948 film was the first British production to win the Best Picture Oscar?

Hamlet won Best Picture for 1948, and Laurence Olivier became the first person to direct himself to a Best Actor Oscar; he cut the text roughly in half, dropping Rosencrantz, Guildenstern and Fortinbras.

Which 1948 Italian neorealist film was voted the greatest film of all time by Sight & Sound in 1952?

Bicycle Thieves, Vittorio De Sica's story of a poor father hunting his stolen bicycle in postwar Rome, topped the first Sight & Sound critics' poll in 1952 and received an honorary Oscar as best foreign film.

Which committee's October 1947 hearings into Hollywood led to the studio blacklist?

The House Un-American Activities Committee's October 1947 hearings produced the Hollywood Ten, writers and directors jailed for contempt of Congress, and the studios' Waldorf Statement that began the blacklist.

Which radio announcer created Howdy Doody, which reached NBC television in late 1947?

Buffalo Bob Smith, a WNBC radio host, created and voiced the puppet, which debuted on NBC on 27 December 1947 as Puppet Playhouse; the show ran until 1960 and switched to colour in 1955.

Texaco Star Theater gave which comedian the nickname 'Mr. Television' after its 1948 TV debut?

Milton Berle hosted the TV Texaco Star Theater from June 1948 and drew up to 80 percent of viewers, earning the nicknames 'Mr. Television' and 'Uncle Miltie'; Fred Allen had fronted the radio version from 1940 to 1944.

Which watchmaker aired the world's first television advertisement on July 1, 1941?

It ran before a Dodgers-Phillies game on New York station WNBT.

Hemingway's 1940 novel For Whom the Bell Tolls is set during which conflict?

It is set in the Spanish Civil War in 1937; Robert Jordan, an American demolitions expert fighting with Republican guerrillas, is sent to blow up a bridge ahead of a Republican offensive.

What is the name of the indifferent narrator of Camus's 1942 novella The Stranger?

Meursault, a clerk in Algiers, narrates his mother's funeral, a killing on a beach and his trial with the same detachment; Gallimard's first edition in 1942 ran to just 4,400 copies.

On what date did A Streetcar Named Desire first open on Broadway?

The play opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on December 3, 1947, with Marlon Brando as Stanley and Jessica Tandy as Blanche, directed by Elia Kazan; it won Williams the 1948 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

In which country was Saint-Exupéry's famous 1943 novella about a young prince first published?

Reynal & Hitchcock published The Little Prince in New York in April 1943, in both English and French, while Saint-Exupéry was living in the United States; his books were banned in Vichy France and it appeared there only in 1946.

Under what name did Curious George first appear in a 1939 book?

The monkey was called Fifi in Cecily G. and the Nine Monkeys, the Reys' 1939 Paris book; he got his own book, Curious George, in 1941 after they fled France, and British editions renamed him Zozo.

How many people died in the November 1942 Cocoanut Grove nightclub fire?

The Boston fire of 28 November 1942 killed 492 people; revolving doors jammed, other exits were locked or hidden, and flammable décor spread the blaze in minutes, prompting new US fire codes.

Which ship exploded first in the 1947 Texas City disaster?

Fire aboard the French freighter Grandcamp, loaded with about 2,100 tons of ammonium nitrate, set off the blast on 16 April 1947; the High Flyer exploded the next morning. At least 581 died, including 27 of the 28 volunteer firefighters.

The 1944 Hartford circus fire broke out during a performance by which circus?

The big top of Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey, waterproofed with paraffin dissolved in gasoline, burned on 6 July 1944 during a matinee; at least 167 people died, many of them children.

Who chaired the UN committee that drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?

Eleanor Roosevelt chaired the UN Commission on Human Rights and its drafting committee, with René Cassin and John Humphrey among the principal authors; the declaration was adopted on 10 December 1948 at the Palais de Chaillot in Paris.

How many UN members voted in favour of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948?

48 of the 58 UN members voted in favour and none against; the Soviet bloc, South Africa and Saudi Arabia were among eight abstainers, and Honduras and Yemen were absent.

How many articles make up the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?

The declaration has 30 articles, from the first's 'All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights' to the 30th, which bars reading the text as licence to destroy the rights it lists.

The Tony Awards are named after which co-founder of the American Theatre Wing?

Antoinette Perry, an actress and director who co-founded the American Theatre Wing and ran its Stage Door Canteens, died in 1946; her partner, producer Brock Pemberton, founded the awards in her memory in 1947.

In what year was the first Golden Globes ceremony held?

The Hollywood Foreign Press Association held its first ceremony in January 1944 at the 20th Century-Fox studios, honouring 1943 films; The Song of Bernadette was named best picture.

Woody Guthrie wrote 'This Land Is Your Land' in 1940 as a critical response to which song?

Guthrie, sick of hearing Kate Smith's 'God Bless America' on the radio, wrote his answer in February 1940 in a New York hotel, originally titled 'God Blessed America for Me'.

Nat King Cole's trio was the top-selling group of the 1940s on which record label?

The trio signed with the young Capitol Records in 1943, and hits like 'Straighten Up and Fly Right' and 'The Christmas Song' earned Capitol's Hollywood tower the nickname 'the House that Nat Built'.

What was the name of Hank Williams's backup band, managed by his mother?

Williams formed the Drifting Cowboys in 1937 in Montgomery, where his mother Lillie booked their shows and drove them to gigs; he had learned guitar from the street bluesman Rufus 'Tee-Tot' Payne.

What name did Bletchley Park give the four-rotor U-boat Enigma network introduced in February 1942?

Bletchley called the Atlantic U-boat network Shark; the Germans added a fourth rotor on 1 February 1942, blacking out Allied reading until December 1942, when documents seized from U-559 helped break back in.

What did the German name Vergeltungswaffe 2, or V-2, mean?

Vergeltungswaffe means 'vengeance weapon', a propaganda label Goebbels gave the rockets in 1944; engineers at Peenemünde under Wernher von Braun knew it as the Aggregat-4.

On what date did a V-2 test first pass 100 km, the later Kármán line?

Test rocket MW 18014, launched vertically from Peenemünde on 20 June 1944, reached about 176 km, the first man-made object above the 100 km Kármán line; the 3 October 1942 flight had peaked at 84.5 km.

The idea of Rosie the Riveter originated in a 1942 song by which songwriters?

Redd Evans and John Jacob Loeb wrote 'Rosie the Riveter' in 1942, and the Four Vagabonds' 1943 recording made it a hit; Norman Rockwell's Rosie followed on a Saturday Evening Post cover in May 1943.

What did the Japanese military call the Pearl Harbor attack during planning?

The navy called it Operation Z, after the Z flag Togo had flown at Tsushima in 1905, as well as the Hawaii Operation and Operation AI; Yamamoto's staff planned it through 1941.

On what date did Japan dispatch its naval attack group toward Pearl Harbor?

Nagumo's carrier striking force left Hitokappu Bay in the Kuril Islands on November 26, 1941 (Japan time), sailing a northern route in radio silence; the same day Washington delivered the Hull note.

Which fibre, on general sale in the US from May 1940, replaced silk in stockings?

DuPont's nylon stockings went on sale nationwide on 15 May 1940 and sold out within days; after Pearl Harbor the fibre was diverted to parachutes, and 'nylon riots' greeted its return in 1945.

When Franklin Roosevelt died in 1945, what did he become the only US president to have done?

Roosevelt was elected four times, in 1932, 1936, 1940 and 1944, the only president to serve more than two terms; the 22nd Amendment, ratified in 1951, made two the limit.

How many meetings were held at Potsdam between 17 and 25 July before the conference paused for the British election?

Molotov, Eden, Bevin and Byrnes were the key foreign ministers.

How many people did the Manhattan Project employ at its peak?

The project employed nearly 130,000 people at its peak in mid-1944, most of them at the Oak Ridge and Hanford plants; over 80 percent of its roughly $2 billion cost went to producing fissile material.

How many people attended the Hartford circus performance when fire broke out in July 1944?

An estimated 6,000 to 8,000 people, mostly women and children, were inside the tent on 6 July 1944; at least 167 died and more than 700 were injured in under ten minutes.

Who bought the rights to Alfred Butts's word game in 1948 and renamed it Scrabble?

Butts had called it Criss-Crosswords; Brunot chose 'Scrabble', a real word meaning 'scratch frantically', and made early sets in a converted Connecticut schoolhouse.

The second 'M' in M&M's stood for Bruce Murrie, son of which rival chocolate firm's president?

Bruce Murrie was the son of Hershey president William Murrie, and the partnership secured scarce wartime chocolate from Hershey; Forrest Mars had seen soldiers eating Smarties in the Spanish Civil War. Murrie sold his stake in 1949.

Which magazine editor coined the phrase 'The New Look' for Christian Dior's debut 1947 collection?

Carmel Snow, editor of Harper's Bazaar, told Dior 'your dresses have such a new look' at the 12 February 1947 show of his Corolle and Huit lines, whose full skirts and nipped waists revived Paris fashion.

In which California city did Frank Zamboni build the first ice resurfacing machine in 1949?

Frank Zamboni built the Model A in 1949 at his Iceland rink in Paramount, near Los Angeles, after years of hand-resurfacing; he had begun in refrigeration making ice blocks, and his name became a genericised trademark.

In which California city did the McDonald brothers open the first McDonald's in 1940?

Richard and Maurice McDonald opened their barbecue drive-in on E Street in San Bernardino on 15 May 1940, relocating a stand from Monrovia; the 'Speedee Service System' followed in 1948, and Ray Kroc first visited in 1954.

What did Lego call the early version of its interlocking plastic toy pieces introduced in 1949?

Lego sold them as Automatic Binding Bricks from 1949, copying Hilary Page's Kiddicraft Self-Locking Bricks, patented in Britain in 1940; the Lego name went on the bricks only in 1953 and the stud-and-tube design came in 1958.

What did the Reynolds Rocket ballpoint pen cost at its 1945 New York debut?

Gimbels sold the Reynolds Rocket for $12.50 on 29 October 1945, moving about 10,000 pens on the first day; Milton Reynolds had copied the design from a Birome he bought in Buenos Aires.

Besides Willys, which company built the standardized WWII jeep, under the designation GPW?

Ford built about 280,000 GPWs to the Willys MB design from 1942 to 1945, nearly half of all wartime jeeps; Bantam, which had built the original prototype, lost out for lack of capacity.