204 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?

6 June was D-Day only because of the weather: Eisenhower had chosen 5 June, then held the invasion back 24 hours when conditions in the Channel turned bad.

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; by then it was already past midnight in Moscow, so Russia marks 9 May.

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

New Mexico's Jornada del Muerto desert was the test site; the blast melted the sand into a light green, mildly radioactive glass that was named trinitite.

The United Nations was founded at a 1945 conference in which US city?

San Francisco hosted delegates of 50 nations for two months; they signed the charter on 26 June 1945, leaving a space for Poland, whose new government had not yet been formed.

Which US Secretary of State proposed the aid programme that rebuilt post-war Western Europe?

George Marshall set out the plan in a Harvard commencement speech in June 1947; the Soviet Union was offered a share but refused it and kept its Eastern European satellites out as well.

Operation Vittles was the American codename for which famous operation of the 1940s?

The Berlin Airlift flew in more than 2.3 million tons of food and coal in 15 months; pilot Gail Halvorsen began dropping sweets to children on handkerchief parachutes, a sideline dubbed Little Vittles.

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

The Chicago Daily Tribune went to press early with the headline, sure like the pollsters that Truman would lose; two days later he held the paper aloft, grinning, from his train 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.

Which condemned Nazi leader swallowed cyanide the night before his scheduled Nuremberg hanging?

Hermann Göring took a cyanide capsule in his cell, so Joachim von Ribbentrop became the first of the condemned men to be hanged a few hours later.

Who read out Israel's declaration of independence at the Tel Aviv Museum on 14 May 1948?

David Ben-Gurion took 16 minutes to read it, at a ceremony kept quiet in case it was stopped; the British Mandate ended at midnight, and Washington recognised the new state eleven minutes later.

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.

Which item was the only one still rationed in America after 1945, staying on coupons until June 1947?

Sugar was the first food rationed, in May 1942, and the last freed: by the end of 1945 it was the only commodity still on coupons, and it stayed there until June 1947.

The Pentagon, built in just 16 months and completed in 1943, stands in which US state?

Virginia's Arlington County got the Pentagon, whose five sides were drawn to fit an awkward plot at Arlington Farms; Roosevelt moved the site, but the shape stayed because he liked it.

Mount Rushmore, declared complete in October 1941 after its sculptor died, is in which state?

South Dakota's monument was meant to show the four presidents down to the waist, but Gutzon Borglum died in March 1941 and the money ran out, so work stopped that October at the heads.

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

The Brooklyn Dodgers' Branch Rickey told Robinson he wanted a player 'with guts enough not to fight back' against racist abuse, and signed him only after getting that promise.

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

London built no new venues for the Games: with rationing still on, athletes were lodged in military camps rather than an Olympic village, while Germany and Japan were not invited and the Soviet Union stayed away.

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

Yeager flew the Bell X-1 with two ribs broken in a riding fall two nights earlier; he hid the injury, and a friend sawed off a broom handle so he could lever the hatch shut.

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

Balsa logs copied the Inca rafts that Spanish conquistadors had drawn; Kon-Tiki left Callao, Peru, and after 101 days at sea smashed onto a reef in the Tuamotus.

Balloon debris that the US Army first announced as a captured 'flying disc' in July 1947 was found near which town?

Roswell's army airfield announced the 'flying disc', then called it a weather balloon; a 1994 Air Force report admitted that was cover for Project Mogul, which flew microphones to detect Soviet atomic tests.

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

The University of Pennsylvania built ENIAC to compute artillery firing tables, but its first real job, in December 1945, was a secret calculation on whether a hydrogen bomb was feasible.

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

Bell Labs' John Bardeen and Walter Brattain built it in December 1947; their boss William Shockley, angry at being left off the patent, shut himself in a Chicago hotel and devised the sturdier junction transistor.

Raytheon's 1947 'Radarange', born of wartime radar work, was the first commercial version of which appliance?

The microwave oven is said to have begun when Percy Spencer noticed a candy bar melting in his pocket near a working radar magnetron; he then held popcorn kernels up to it and watched them pop.

Which company, founded by Edwin Land, put the first instant camera on sale in 1948?

Polaroid's Edwin Land began the project after his three-year-old daughter asked why she couldn't see a holiday snap at once; all 57 cameras at a Boston store sold on the first day in November 1948.

Which toy did engineer Richard James demonstrate at Gimbels in 1945, selling 400 in 90 minutes?

The Slinky began when James knocked springs off a shelf and watched them 'walk' down instead of falling; his wife Betty combed the dictionary for its name.

Which 1940s kitchen brand sold poorly until buyers were shown how to 'burp' its lids?

Tupperware took off only when Brownie Wise sold it at home parties, where the airtight seal could be demonstrated; Earl Tupper made her a vice president and pulled the line out of the shops.

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

A public nuclear bomb test at Bikini Atoll came four days before the launch; no fashion model would wear so little, so Réard hired Micheline Bernardini, a nude dancer from the Casino de Paris.

Which breakfast cereal of 1941 later dropped two letters from its name?

Cheerios began as CheeriOats, an oat cereal that grew out of the puffing process General Mills had devised for Kix; the 'at' was later dropped.

Which fastener did George de Mestral devise after picking burrs off his dog in 1941?

Velcro came from a closer look: under a microscope de Mestral saw the burrs' tiny hooks catching in loops of fur and cloth, and he spent years getting fabric to copy them.

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.

Which game did Anthony Pratt devise at home in Birmingham during wartime air raids, finally released in 1949?

Cluedo blends 'clue' with Ludo, Latin for 'I play'; patented in 1947, it was held up by post-war shortages until 1949, and North America got it as plain Clue.

Which toy is said to have begun in 1943 as a General Electric engineer's failed attempt at synthetic rubber?

Silly Putty bounced but was no use as rubber; in 1950 marketer Peter Hodgson, deep in debt, borrowed $147 to pack it into plastic eggs, and a New Yorker mention sold over 250,000 of them.

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

Levitt & Sons finished up to 30 houses a day for returning WWII veterans, 17,447 in all, yet every contract barred occupants who were not 'members of the Caucasian race'.

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's film was rushed to its premiere in November 1942 to cash in on the Allied landings at Casablanca weeks earlier; Warner Bros. had paid $20,000 for the unproduced play behind it.

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

Orson Welles co-wrote, produced, directed and starred in it; press baron William Randolph Hearst, a model for Kane, forbade any mention of the film in his newspapers.

How did the film It's a Wonderful Life (1946) fare on first release?

It 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 film about men home from the war won seven Oscars, including one for amputee Harold Russell?

The Best Years of Our Lives cast Harold Russell, a non-actor who lost both hands in an army training accident; he won two Oscars for the role and sold one in 1992, saying he needed to pay his wife's medical bills.

Disney's Fantasia (1940) set its animation to classical pieces conducted by whom?

Leopold Stokowski met Walt Disney by chance at a Hollywood restaurant and offered to conduct The Sorcerer's Apprentice for nothing; the short grew into a feature, mostly played by his Philadelphia Orchestra.

Which character hunts Bugs Bunny in A Wild Hare (1940), the cartoon that fixed the rabbit's personality?

Elmer Fudd is the hunter in A Wild Hare, where Bugs first asks 'What's up, Doc?'; director Tex Avery said it was just a common expression in his native Texas.

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

Holiday Inn, about an inn open only on holidays, gave Crosby the song and a hotel chain its name: Kemmons Wilson's architect put the film's title on his 1952 motel plans as a joke.

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

RCA Victor presented Miller with the first gold record ever awarded in February 1942, to mark 1.2 million sales; the song had begun as a production number in the 1941 film Sun Valley Serenade.

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

Bobby soxers, named for their ankle socks, were so devoted that in October 1944 some 35,000 fans shut out of his New York show caused a near riot, remembered as the Columbus Day Riot.

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, lost the Oscar to 'The Last Time I Saw Paris'; Bette Midler's cover took it back into the US top ten three decades later.

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

Bebop took shape at after-hours jam sessions in Harlem clubs like Minton's Playhouse, where the regulars played standards at breakneck tempos and in awkward keys to keep weaker players off the stand.

Which 1945 Orwell book did publishers reject for fear of offending the Soviets?

Animal Farm was turned down by at least four publishers, among them T. S. Eliot at Faber, who found its view 'not convincing'; it finally came out in August 1945, as the war ended.

Who kept Anne Frank's diary in a desk drawer and returned it to her father?

Miep Gies never read the pages while she kept them, saying later she would have had to destroy them to protect the people they named; Otto Frank published them in 1947 as Het Achterhuis.

Which Arthur Miller play opened on Broadway in 1949?

Death of a Salesman came fast: Miller built himself a small studio in Roxbury, Connecticut, wrote the first act there in less than a day and finished the play within six weeks.

Which superhero was created in 1941 by William Moulton Marston, a psychologist who helped develop the lie detector?

Wonder Woman's magic lasso makes anyone it binds obey and speak honestly, often read as an echo of Marston's lie-detector work; she first appeared in All Star Comics #8.

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.

Churchill named the Battle of Britain in his 'finest hour' speech of June 1940, days after which ally sought an armistice?

France asked for an armistice on 16 June; two days later Churchill told the Commons that the Battle of France was over and '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 fought it: the Luftwaffe had to win control of the skies before any invasion, and when the RAF held on, the planned landing in Britain was postponed indefinitely that September.

What was the codename of the Dunkirk evacuation?

Operation Dynamo was run by Vice-Admiral Bertram Ramsay from tunnels deep in the cliffs beneath Dover Castle; his staff had been planning a sea rescue for about a week before the order came.

The civilian boats that rescued troops from Dunkirk in 1940 are remembered by what name?

The little ships ferried soldiers from the shallows out to bigger vessels offshore, though most of the 338,226 men brought home boarded from the harbour mole, not the beaches.

Which German formation was destroyed at the Battle of Stalingrad?

The 6th Army was encircled in November 1942 and forbidden to break out; Paulus was made a field marshal at the very end, since none had ever surrendered, and then gave himself up on 31 January 1943.

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.

At which June 1942 battle did US codebreaking let Admiral Nimitz ambush and sink four Japanese aircraft carriers?

Midway was confirmed as the target by a trick: the island was told to radio in plain language that its water plant had failed, and a decoded Japanese signal soon reported 'AF' short of water.

Operation Detachment, in February 1945, landed US Marines on which small Pacific island, prized for its airfields?

Iwo Jima's airfields later served fighter escorts and B-29s making emergency landings; the five-week battle cost the Americans about 6,800 dead.

Which Associated Press photographer took the famous 1945 flag-raising picture on Mount Suribachi?

Joe Rosenthal was piling stones to stand on when the second, larger flag started up, so he swung his camera round and shot; the picture became the model for the Marine Corps War Memorial.

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

Little Boy's gun-type uranium design went into action untested: the Trinity shot three weeks earlier had tried only the plutonium type, the kind dropped on Nagasaki.

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

Pilot Paul Tibbets's mother, Enola Gay Tibbets, had her name painted on the B-29 just before the mission; its regular commander, Robert Lewis, displaced for the flight, was furious to find it there.

Operation Meetinghouse, the most destructive air raid of World War II, burned out the heart of which city in March 1945?

Tokyo was hit at night from low altitude: Curtis LeMay had most of the B-29s' guns removed to carry more incendiaries, and the fires killed some 90,000 to 100,000 people in a single night.

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

Leslie Groves had just overseen the building of the Pentagon; he was made a brigadier general for the new job because the title was thought to carry more weight with academic scientists.

Britain's atomic bomb programme, absorbed into the Manhattan Project, hid behind which misleading codename?

Tube Alloys began before the Manhattan Project and was folded into it at Quebec in 1943; when Washington ended the partnership after the war, Britain started again alone.

Which physicist led the team that achieved the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction, under a Chicago football stand in 1942?

Enrico Fermi's pile of graphite and uranium went critical on 2 December 1942 in a disused court under Stagg Field; the news was phoned through in code: 'The Italian navigator has landed in the New World.'

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.

Bletchley Park's wartime codebreaking body, the Government Code and Cypher School, was renamed in 1946 as which agency?

GCHQ kept its wartime triumph secret for three decades: the Ultra story reached the public only in 1974, with Frederick Winterbotham's book The Ultra Secret.

Where did most Doolittle Raid bombers crash after striking Japan in April 1942?

China was the planned refuge, though every crew that got there had to bail out or crash-land; one B-25 flew to the Soviet Union instead, and Japan launched a reprisal campaign where the airmen had been sheltered.

From which aircraft carrier did the Doolittle Raid launch?

USS Hornet launched the bombers early, about 650 nautical miles out, after a Japanese picket boat sighted the task force; asked where the planes had come from, Roosevelt answered 'Shangri-La'.

The 'Big Three' met in February 1945 at the Livadia Palace, a former tsar's retreat near which Black Sea resort?

Yalta was Stalin's choice: he insisted his doctors opposed any long trip, so the British and American leaders came to him, the Americans lodging in the Livadia Palace, a summer retreat of the last tsar.

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

Winston Churchill opened the conference for Britain, but the election count on 26 July turned him out of office mid-summit, and Clement Attlee took his seat for the final sessions.

Germany's last major western offensive, launched through the Ardennes in December 1944, is best known by what name?

The Battle of the Bulge was named by the press for the dent the attack pushed into the Allied line on news maps; at encircled Bastogne, the American commander answered a surrender demand with one word: 'Nuts!'

Franklin D. Roosevelt died in April 1945 while sitting for a portrait at his retreat in which town?

Warm Springs, Georgia, had drawn Roosevelt since 1924, when he began bathing in its warm water to strengthen his paralysed legs; the painting, never completed, became known as the Unfinished Portrait.

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

82 days was all the time FDR's last vice president had, and the two met alone only twice; he was told about the atomic bomb project only after being sworn in as president.

Which Republican ticket did Franklin Roosevelt defeat in the 1944 presidential election?

Thomas Dewey and John Bricker carried 12 states to Roosevelt's 36; Dewey knew the US had broken Japanese codes but, urged by the Army's chief of staff, kept the secret out of his campaign.

Which alliance was founded in April 1949 when twelve nations signed a mutual-defence treaty in Washington?

NATO's Article 5 treats an armed attack on one member as an attack on all; the clause was first invoked more than fifty years later, after the September 11 attacks of 2001.

Which Labour minister, appointed Minister of Health in 1945, founded Britain's National Health Service?

Aneurin Bevan launched the service on 5 July 1948 after overcoming the hospital consultants' resistance; as he later put it, 'ultimately I had to stuff 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 by religion between India and Pakistan, and at least ten million people fled across the new borders in one of history's largest migrations.

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

The Radcliffe Line was drawn in haste by British lawyer Cyril Radcliffe, who had never visited India before, and was announced on 17 August 1947, two days after independence.

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.

Gandhi was shot in 1948 while walking to what?

Prayers: Gandhi, 78, was shot at close range in the garden of Birla House in New Delhi on his way to a prayer meeting; millions of mourners turned out for his funeral.

Which two institutions were created at the 1944 Bretton Woods conference?

The IMF and the World Bank were agreed there by delegates from 44 Allied nations, who also tied their currencies to a US dollar that was itself convertible into gold.

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

John Maynard Keynes and Harry Dexter White drafted rival British and American plans; Keynes's called for a new world currency, the bancor, which never came into being.

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

The American Legion designed the bill and pushed it through Congress; former national commander Harry Colmery is credited with the first draft, reportedly jotted on Mayflower Hotel stationery.

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

The Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944 paid for college, backed home loans and gave a year of unemployment pay; by 1947 ex-servicemen made up almost half of US college admissions.

The 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, passed over a presidential veto, curbed the power of which organisations?

Labor unions lost the closed shop under Taft-Hartley, which also let the government seek court orders against strikes that threatened national safety; it followed the strike wave of 1945 and 1946.

Which codebreaking computer did Post Office engineer Tommy Flowers build in 1943?

Colossus was designed and built in eleven months at the Post Office research station at Dollis Hill; it stayed secret for decades, which cost Flowers and his team the credit they were due.

Which German high-command cipher was Britain's 1943 codebreaking computer built to attack?

The Lorenz cipher, codenamed Tunny, carried teleprinter messages between the German high command and its armies; Bletchley's codebreakers worked out the machine's structure years before they ever saw one.

Whose Z3, completed in Berlin in 1941, was the first working programmable, fully automatic digital computer?

Konrad Zuse built the Z3 from telephone relays, working in wartime isolation from computer pioneers abroad; an air raid on Berlin destroyed the machine in 1943.

Alfred Kinsey was a zoology professor at which university when he published his 1948 report on male sexual behavior?

Indiana University was where Kinsey taught zoology and measured gall wasps by the hundred thousand before founding its Institute for Sex Research in 1947; his 1948 report drew on about 5,300 interviews with men.

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

Columbia Records unveiled the microgroove LP, developed by Peter Goldmark's team, in June 1948; RCA Victor answered in March 1949 with its rival 7-inch 45 rpm single.

Swiss chemist Paul Müller won the 1948 Nobel Prize for discovering which chemical's power to kill insects?

DDT had been made in 1874 but its use lay unknown until Müller's 1939 tests; it fought wartime typhus and malaria, then was banned in the US in 1972 after Silent Spring raised alarm over its effects.

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

Fleming, Florey and Chain shared the 1945 prize: Alexander Fleming found the mould in 1928, and Howard Florey and Ernst Chain's 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 bomber plant had been wrecked by wartime bombing, turned to scooters and launched the Vespa ('wasp') in April 1946, designed by aeronautical engineer Corradino D'Ascanio.

Which baseball player hit safely in a record 56 consecutive games in 1941?

Joe DiMaggio's 56-game streak was not even his longest: as an 18-year-old minor-leaguer in the Pacific Coast League in 1933 he had hit safely in 61 straight games.

Which Yankees catcher debuted in 1946 and won a record ten World Series?

Yogi Berra reached the Yankees in September 1946, two years after manning a gun on a Navy rocket boat off Normandy on D-Day, and won ten World Series, the most by any player.

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

The Boston Red Sox had Ted Williams from 1939 to 1960; he lost three full seasons and most of two more to service as a Marine pilot, then hit a home run in his final at-bat.

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

Citation's regular jockey, Al Snider, vanished in a storm on a fishing trip off the Florida Keys that March; Eddie Arcaro took over the ride and won the Triple Crown.

Which boxer held the heavyweight title from 1937 to 1949?

Joe Louis fought a charity bout for Navy relief in January 1942, then joined the Army and boxed 96 exhibitions before some two million troops.

Fanny Blankers-Koen, 'the Flying Housewife' who won four golds at the 1948 Olympics, ran for which country?

Netherlands star Blankers-Koen, a 30-year-old mother of two, entered only four events and won them all, skipping the high jump and long jump although she had set world records in both.

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

The Basketball Association of America, founded in 1946 by owners of big-city arenas, took in the older National Basketball League in 1949; the NBA counts its history from the BAA's first season.

Which Canadian team hosted the New York Knickerbockers in 1946 in what the NBA counts as the league's first game?

The Toronto Huskies lost 68–66 to the Knickerbockers at Maple Leaf Gardens on November 1, 1946, after promising free entry to any fan taller than their tallest player; they folded after one season.

Which Broadway musical opened in 1943 and ran for 2,212 performances, then a record for a musical?

Oklahoma! was Rodgers and Hammerstein's first show together, written with the lyrics first and the music second; its run of over five years was unmatched by any musical until My Fair Lady.

Rodgers and Hammerstein's first musical together, in 1943, was based on which 1931 play by Lynn Riggs?

Green Grow the Lilacs was first staged by the Theatre Guild in 1931; a decade later one of the Guild's producers saw a revival with folk songs and square dances and asked for a musical version.

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

Tales of the South Pacific grew out of Michener's wartime navy posting to Espiritu Santo in the New Hebrides; the musical weaves together two of its stories, about a navy nurse and a young Marine lieutenant.

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?

Wales is home to the Morgans, a coal-mining family in the southern valleys; the 1941 film of Richard Llewellyn's 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 had never written a screenplay; he and Billy Wilder did not get along, and he quit once, but they finished the script from James M. Cain's novella, serialized in Liberty magazine in 1936.

Which Christmas film did Fox release in June 1947, hoping warm weather would boost audiences?

Miracle on 34th Street reached cinemas that summer at studio chief Darryl Zanuck's insistence, with a trailer that never mentioned Christmas; British cinemas first showed it as The Big Heart.

Which Elia Kazan film about antisemitism won the Best Picture Oscar for 1947?

Gentleman's Agreement stars Gregory Peck as a journalist who pretends to be Jewish to research an exposé of polite prejudice; it won Best Picture and Best Director.

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; to save time he cut Rosencrantz, Guildenstern and Fortinbras altogether.

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

Bicycle Thieves was shot on location in Rome with untrained actors: Vittorio De Sica cast a factory worker, Lamberto Maggiorani, as the father, and the film won 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 first voiced Howdy on radio; when the puppet's maker walked out with the original in a rights dispute, the show said Howdy was away having plastic surgery and unveiled a new face.

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

Milton Berle earned the name 'Mr. Television' as American television sales more than doubled after his show's 1948 debut; Fred Allen had hosted the radio original.

Which watchmaker aired the first paid television commercial in the US on July 1, 1941?

Bulova paid less than ten dollars to show a clock face on New York's WNBT before a baseball broadcast, on the first day that television stations were allowed to sell advertising.

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

The Spanish Civil War, which Hemingway had reported on, frames Robert Jordan's mission to blow up a bridge; the Pulitzer board chose the novel for 1941, but the university president who chaired it blocked the award.

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

Meursault, a clerk in Algiers, kills a man on a beach weeks after his mother's funeral; at his trial the prosecutor dwells less on the killing than on his failure to cry for her.

Which little-known 23-year-old actor became a star as Stanley Kowalski when A Streetcar Named Desire opened on Broadway in 1947?

Marlon Brando got the part only after talks with first choice John Garfield fell through; Jessica Tandy played Blanche, and Elia Kazan directed both the play and the 1951 film.

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

The United States was Saint-Exupéry's wartime home, and Reynal & Hitchcock of New York published The Little Prince in April 1943 in English and French; Vichy had banned his books, so France saw it only after liberation.

Which storybook character's manuscript did Hans and Margret Rey carry from Europe in 1940?

Curious George helped his creators escape: an official who searched the German-born Reys' bags found only a children's story and let them go; the book was published in 1941.

Laws after the 1942 Cocoanut Grove fire required hinged doors beside which entrances?

Revolving doors proved deadly: the one at the club's main entrance jammed in the crush, and 492 people died; new codes allowed them only with outward-swinging doors alongside, or with leaves that fold flat.

Which fertiliser was the French freighter Grandcamp carrying when it blew up in the 1947 Texas City disaster?

Ammonium nitrate in the Grandcamp's hold caught fire and detonated, igniting a second ship that blew up the next morning; nearly 600 people died, among them almost all of the town's 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, widow of the wartime president, chaired the UN Commission on Human Rights and its drafting committee; the General Assembly adopted the text in December 1948 without a single vote against.

Which of these countries abstained when the UN adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948?

South Africa, then writing apartheid into law, abstained alongside Saudi Arabia and the Soviet bloc; 48 members voted in favour and not one against.

In which European capital did the UN adopt the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?

Paris: the General Assembly met there in December 1948; earlier, India's delegate Hansa Mehta is credited with getting the draft's 'all men' changed to 'all human beings'.

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

Antoinette Perry, known as Tony, helped found the American Theatre Wing and led it through the war; after she died in 1946 her producing partner Brock Pemberton founded the awards in her name.

Which awards did Hollywood's foreign journalists first present in 1944?

The Golden Globes were first presented at the 20th Century-Fox studios, where The Song of Bernadette was named best film; winners received scrolls, and the globe statuette was designed the following year.

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 recorded its 1940s hits, including 'The Christmas Song', for which record label?

Capitol Records, then a young label, had the trio as its top-selling group, and hits like 'Straighten Up and Fly Right' earned its Hollywood tower the nickname 'the House that Nat Built'.

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

The Drifting Cowboys were formed by a teenage Williams in Montgomery with his mother Lillie as manager; he had learned his guitar style from the street bluesman Rufus 'Tee-Tot' Payne.

Bletchley Park's 'Shark' blackout of 1942 hid which German force's Enigma messages?

Atlantic U-boats switched to a four-rotor Enigma on 1 February 1942, blinding Bletchley until that December, after codebooks were seized from the sinking U-559.

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

Vengeance Weapon 2 translates Vergeltungswaffe 2, the Propaganda Ministry's name for the missiles fired at Allied cities from September 1944; its engineers called the rocket the A4.

A German V-2 test in June 1944 became the first man-made object to do what?

Reach outer space: fired straight up, the rocket climbed to about 175 km, well past the 100 km line later adopted as the edge of space, so its record was only recognised in hindsight.

A wartime hit song by Redd Evans and John Jacob Loeb gave its name to which home-front icon?

Rosie the Riveter began as this song; Norman Rockwell painted her for a 1943 Saturday Evening Post cover, while the 'We Can Do It!' poster was only linked to her name in the 1980s.

Which admiral conceived Operation Z, Japan's plan to attack Pearl Harbor?

Isoroku Yamamoto, who had studied at Harvard, planned the strike while doubting the war: he warned he could 'run wild' for six months or a year but had no confidence after that.

Which radio signal told the Japanese fleet that the Pearl Harbor attack had achieved complete surprise?

'Tora! Tora! Tora!' was radioed by strike leader Mitsuo Fuchida; tora means 'tiger'. After the war Fuchida converted to Christianity and spent the rest of his life as an evangelist.

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

Nylon stockings from DuPont reached stores nationwide on 15 May 1940 and sold out in most by noon; wartime production switched to parachutes, and the stockings' scarce return in 1945 set off 'nylon riots'.

Franklin Roosevelt, who died in office in 1945, is the only US president to have done what?

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.

Which phrase did Winston Churchill popularise in his March 1946 speech at Fulton, Missouri?

Iron curtain: Churchill told his Missouri audience one had descended 'from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic', with President Truman on the platform beside him.

About how many people did the secret Manhattan Project employ at its peak?

About 130,000 people worked on the Manhattan Project at its peak, a workforce comparable to the whole US car industry, yet it stayed secret until the bomb was used.

Which high-wire family was starting its act when the Hartford circus fire broke out in July 1944?

The Flying Wallendas had just begun their act when flames ran up the tent wall; bandleader Merle Evans struck up 'The Stars and Stripes Forever', the circus signal that something was wrong.

Which word game, invented by out-of-work architect Alfred Butts, did James Brunot rename and start selling in 1948?

Scrabble was Criss-Crosswords until Brunot renamed it; the big game makers had turned it down, and his family lost money making sets in a converted Connecticut schoolhouse before demand took off in 1952.

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

Hershey president William Murrie's son Bruce took a 20 percent stake, a tie that guaranteed the new candy scarce wartime chocolate from Hershey; Forrest Mars bought him out once rationing ended.

Harper's Bazaar editor Carmel Snow gave the name 'New Look' to the 1947 debut collection of which French designer?

Christian Dior showed narrow waists and long, full skirts on 12 February 1947, a luxury after years of wartime austerity; Snow told him his dresses had 'such a new look', and the name stuck.

What kind of machine did Frank Zamboni invent in the 1940s?

An ice resurfacer: Zamboni, who had once sold block ice, co-owned the Iceland rink in Paramount, California, and built a machine to do in minutes a job that took several workers over an hour.

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

San Bernardino got the brothers' barbecue drive-in in 1940; in 1948 they rebuilt it around a nine-item menu and fast 'Speedee' service, and Ray Kroc became their franchise agent in 1954.

Lego's founder Ole Kirk Christiansen, who launched its first plastic bricks in 1949, originally worked in which trade?

Carpentry: Christiansen built furniture until the Depression pushed him into making toys in his workshop; he bought a plastic moulding machine in 1947 and sold 'Automatic Binding Bricks' two years later.

Which writing instrument went on sale in New York in 1945 at $12.50?

The ballpoint pen went on sale thanks to Milton Reynolds, who reworked László Bíró's design to sidestep its patent and beat the licensed pen makers to market.

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

Ford built the GPW to the Willys design to meet the Army's demand; Bantam, which had delivered the first prototype, lost the big contracts because it lacked the production capacity.

Which magazine, launched in New York in September 1944, was created especially for America's teenage girls?

Seventeen set out to turn teenage girls into model workers and citizens, and its promotion director sold advertisers on this new market with the help of a comic strip called Teena.

Which fictional town is home to teenager Archie Andrews, who made his debut in Pep Comics in 1941?

Riverdale is where Archie goes to high school as a typical small-town teenager, a formula so popular that he later starred in a long-running radio series as well.

Which energetic dance did American troops stationed in Britain before D-Day spread through the country's ballrooms?

Jitterbug brought closed British ballrooms back to life, though many installed jukeboxes instead of hiring bands. By late 1945 English couples were being warned off such 'rude American dancing'.

Sadie Hawkins dances, where women ask men for a date, were inspired by a storyline in which comic strip?

Li'l Abner introduced Sadie Hawkins Day in November 1937, and the idea escaped the page fast: by 1939 Life magazine counted events at 201 colleges.

Which bubble gum did Topps launch in 1947, later wrapping each piece in a small comic strip?

Bazooka was most likely named after the Army's wartime rocket launcher, which had itself been named after a musical instrument. The little comic strips arrived in 1953.

Which company built the Model 1015 jukebox of 1946, nicknamed the 'Bubbler' and offering 24 record selections?

Wurlitzer was riding a boom: by the middle of the 1940s, three-quarters of the records produced in America went into jukeboxes.

Which young actor, famous as small-town teenager Andy Hardy, was Hollywood's top box-office draw from 1939 to 1941?

Mickey Rooney began playing Andy Hardy at 16 and made 16 films in the role, a series that came to stand for mainstream American family life.

Which low-heeled two-tone footwear, usually white with a dark band across the middle, was typical of 1940s schoolgirls?

Saddle shoes take their name from the saddle-shaped panel over the instep, and men wore them too, in styles that ran from golf cleats to school uniform shoes.

Which youth subculture of wartime France wore oversized jackets, carried umbrellas and danced wildly to jazz?

Zazous were concentrated in Paris, where many carried umbrellas and spoke English to one another as a mark of their love of all things British.

Which resistance group of Munich students, including Hans and Sophie Scholl, spread anti-Nazi leaflets from June 1942?

The White Rose ran its leaflet campaign anonymously until February 1943, when the Scholls were caught and executed. That July, Allied planes dropped copies of the group's final leaflet over Germany.

Which actor rose to stardom in 1941 by playing private detective Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon?

Humphrey Bogart also played a career criminal in High Sierra that year, yet his only Oscar came a decade later, for a rough steamboat captain in The African Queen.

Which Hollywood star co-invented a frequency-hopping guidance system for Allied torpedoes with composer George Antheil?

Hedy Lamarr and Antheil designed the system to beat Axis radio jamming, but similar technology only entered service in 1962, three years after their patent had expired.

Which actress, the top pin-up of World War II, had her legs insured by her studio for $1 million?

Betty Grable's insurance policy was a publicity stunt, but the fame was real: her bathing-suit poster outdid every rival, and the comedy Million Dollar Legs gave her a lasting nickname.

Which leading man became the first major American movie star to enlist in the Army for World War II?

James Stewart was turned down for low weight in 1940, got in at the second attempt in February 1941 and, already a licensed pilot, rose to command a bomber squadron.

Which actress became the first African American to win an Oscar, for playing Mammy in Gone with the Wind?

Hattie McDaniel won Best Supporting Actress for a part fought over almost as fiercely as Scarlett O'Hara. She had also been the first Black woman to sing on American radio.

Which comedy star, married to Clark Gable, died in a 1942 plane crash while returning from a war bond tour?

Carole Lombard was only 33 when TWA Flight 3 flew into Mount Potosi in Nevada, ending one of the great careers in screwball comedy.

Olivia de Havilland won a landmark 1944 ruling, capping film contracts at seven calendar years, against which studio?

Warner Bros. had counted only the days she actually worked toward her term; the appeal court ruled that seven years meant seven calendar years, a rule known as the De Havilland Law.

Which actress, famous for a peek-a-boo hairstyle, joined wartime campaigns to stop women's hair catching in machinery?

Veronica Lake found her look by accident, when her long blonde hair fell over her right eye during a take. She also toured the country raising money for war bonds.

Which song-and-dance star performed a routine with an animated cartoon mouse in the 1945 MGM musical Anchors Aweigh?

Gene Kelly plays a sailor who tells schoolchildren how he cheered up a lonesome mouse king whose realm had outlawed singing and dancing, a scene mixing live action with MGM animation.

Which former model, aged nineteen, made a screen debut as the leading lady of To Have and Have Not (1944)?

Lauren Bacall was spotted on a Harper's Bazaar cover by the wife of director Howard Hawks, whose nickname, Slim, went to her character; she later married her co-star.

Which comedian made 57 tours for the USO between 1941 and 1991, entertaining military personnel around the world?

Bob Hope started the tours in the very year the USO was founded and kept them going for half a century, alongside his careers in radio, film and television.

Which cat-and-mouse duo did William Hanna and Joseph Barbera create at MGM with the 1940 short Puss Gets the Boot?

Tom and Jerry arrived while MGM's cartoon studio was struggling to compete with Walt Disney, and that first short promptly earned an Academy Award nomination.

Which Cole Porter show, built around a production of The Taming of the Shrew, won the first Tony Award for Best Musical?

Kiss Me, Kate grew out of a producer's memory of watching a married pair of actors battle on stage and off during a 1935 run of the Shakespeare comedy.

Which British singer, known as the Forces' Sweetheart, gave outdoor concerts for troops in Egypt, India and Burma?

Vera Lynn earned the title before she ever toured: early in the war a Daily Express poll of British servicemen named her their favourite performer.

Which record company introduced the seven-inch 45 rpm single in 1949, marketing the new disc simply as the '45'?

RCA Victor pushed the format with cheap players that took nothing else, and sold boxed sets of four to six 45s to match the music on a single long-playing album.

Which mobster took over the building of the Flamingo, the Las Vegas casino that opened on December 26, 1946?

Bugsy Siegel pushed aside the partner who had started the $1 million project and let its costs climb to $6 million; the three-story hotel opened only the following March.

Which term for Hollywood's shadowy 1940s crime dramas was first applied to them by French critic Nino Frank in 1946?

Film noir, French for 'black film' or 'dark film', was a label that most American film professionals of the era never recognized for the pictures they were making.

Because of a wartime metal shortage, Oscar statuettes were made for three years from which painted material?

Plaster Oscars were only a stopgap: once the war was over, the Academy invited winners to trade them in for gold-plated metal ones.

Which famous screen dog was first played in a 1943 MGM film by a male dog named Pal?

Lassie was first cast with a female collie, but in the usual telling Pal so impressed the director in one sequence that the producers hired him and reshot the first six weeks of filming.

Which silent-era star made his first true sound film in 1940, the political satire The Great Dictator?

Charlie Chaplin wrote, directed, produced and starred in it, and released the film while America was at peace with Nazi Germany.

Which CBS correspondent electrified American radio audiences with live shortwave broadcasts at the height of the Blitz?

Edward R. Murrow changed what war news sounded like; until then, radio news had mostly meant an announcer in a studio reading wire service reports.

Which famous part of the Superman story first appeared in his radio serial in June 1943 rather than in the comics?

Kryptonite arrived in a radio story called The Meteor from Krypton; in the serial, the hero's home planet shared Earth's orbit, hidden on the far side of the Sun.

Which classical piece supplied the galloping theme music of the long-running radio western The Lone Ranger?

William Tell Overture, by Rossini, lent the show its finale, the March of the Swiss Soldiers, and the tune became inseparable from the masked rider and his silver bullets.

Which radio comedian played a vain miser who scraped away at his violin and perpetually claimed to be 39?

Jack Benny really could play: he started out as a violinist on the vaudeville circuit, earning $7.50 a week in 1911, before he made his own vanity the joke.

Which ventriloquist found his greatest success on radio, where listeners could not see his dummy Charlie McCarthy?

Edgar Bergen had made one-reel film shorts, but it was on the air, with McCarthy and a second dummy called Mortimer Snerd, that he became a star.

Which 1940s radio quiz doubled its prize with every answer, giving rise to the phrase 'the $64 question'?

Take It or Leave It started at $1 and doubled through seven questions, and in 1950 the show simply renamed itself The $64 Question.

Which mocking nickname was applied to William Joyce, who broadcast Nazi radio propaganda to Britain from Germany?

Lord Haw-Haw was coined by a reporter and pinned on several English-language announcers in Germany, but it is Joyce with whom the name is overwhelmingly identified.

Which BBC radio programme, first aired in January 1942, has guests choose eight recordings, a book and a luxury item?

Desert Island Discs was devised and first presented by Roy Plomley, and it began life on the BBC Forces Programme, with every guest treated as a castaway.

Which royal bride of November 1947 needed ration coupons to buy the material for a wedding dress?

Princess Elizabeth wore a Norman Hartnell gown of duchesse satin to Westminster Abbey, and on the morning of the ceremony her tiara snapped as she was dressing.

Which French general's BBC radio appeal in June 1940 is often seen as the start of the French Resistance?

Charles de Gaulle is remembered in France by the date of that broadcast, yet no photograph of it exists; the famous picture of him at a BBC microphone was taken later.

Which former radio and film actress became First Lady of Argentina in 1946 and championed votes for women?

Eva Perón had moved to Buenos Aires at 15 to act; once in power she also founded Argentina's first large-scale political party for women.

Which Communist Party chairman proclaimed the People's Republic of China from Tiananmen in Beijing on 1 October 1949?

Mao Zedong made the announcement at exactly three in the afternoon from the top of the Tiananmen Gate, a ceremony that marked the foundation of contemporary China.

Which leader gave the Tryst with Destiny speech and was sworn in as independent India's first prime minister?

Jawaharlal Nehru raised the Indian flag at the Red Fort in Delhi that August and went on to hold the office for more than 16 years.

Which mathematician headed Hut 8 at Bletchley Park, the section that worked on decrypting German naval messages?

Alan Turing had already formalised the idea of computation with his theoretical Turing machine, and at Bletchley his techniques sped up the breaking of Enigma.

Which tycoon was at the controls when his giant wooden flying boat, the Spruce Goose, made its only flight in 1947?

Howard Hughes built it of wood because of wartime limits on aluminum, and despite the nickname it was made almost entirely of birch. It stayed airborne for 26 seconds.

Which French naval officer co-invented the Aqua-Lung, the first successful open-circuit scuba set, during World War II?

Jacques Cousteau worked with engineer Émile Gagnan, whose 1942 demand regulator let divers stay down longer, and used two of the first prototypes to shoot the 1943 film Épaves.

Which pediatrician published The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care in 1946, selling 500,000 copies in six months?

Benjamin Spock's guide became one of the best-selling books of the twentieth century, reaching 50 million copies by the time of his death in 1998.

Which Navy computer pioneer was working on Harvard's Mark II in 1947 when a moth was found jamming one of its relays?

Grace Hopper's colleagues fixed the insect to the day's log sheet with the note 'First actual case of bug being found', and she is credited with popularizing the term debugging.

Which actress, nicknamed the Love Goddess, played the femme fatale in the 1946 film Gilda?

Rita Hayworth, born Margarita Carmen Cansino, was a trained dancer, and a photograph by Bob Landry made her the second favourite pin-up of American GIs.

Which emperor was first heard by ordinary Japanese people in a recorded surrender broadcast on August 15, 1945?

Hirohito did not speak live: the address was replayed from a phonograph record made the day before. He chose to speak at all because he judged that a written rescript would not convince the military.