1940s Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
This 1940s trivia quiz has 204 free questions with answers and covers the whole decade, not just the war. Yes, Pearl Harbor, D-Day and VE Day are here, but so are the Slinky demonstration at Gimbels, the first Tupperware, the bikini named after an atomic test, the transistor, the microwave oven, Jackie Robinson's debut and the newspaper that declared Dewey the winner. Expect questions on the films (Casablanca, Citizen Kane, It's a Wonderful Life), the music (Sinatra, Glenn Miller, the Andrews Sisters, bebop), the books (Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Anne Frank's diary), the toys and games (Candy Land, Cluedo, Silly Putty) and the post-war world of the Marshall Plan, NATO and the baby boom. Difficulty runs from easy to genuinely hard, so it works for a family night or a seniors' group as well as a pub quiz. Every answer was checked against a reference page and each question carries the sentence that supports it.
30 of 204 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor took place on which date?
December 7, 1941
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.
Q 02The D-Day landings in Normandy took place on which date in 1944?
6 June
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.
Q 03Victory in Europe Day, marking Germany's unconditional surrender, is celebrated on which date?
8 May 1945
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.
Q 04The first nuclear device ever detonated, the Trinity test, took place in July 1945 in which state?
New Mexico
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.
Q 05The United Nations was founded at a 1945 conference in which US city?
San Francisco
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.
Q 06Which US Secretary of State proposed the aid programme that rebuilt post-war Western Europe?
George Marshall
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.
Q 07Operation Vittles was the American codename for which famous operation of the 1940s?
The Berlin Airlift
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.
Q 08Which newspaper printed the famous wrong headline 'Dewey Defeats Truman' in November 1948?
Chicago Daily Tribune
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.
Q 09Historians often date the Cold War's start to Truman's March 1947 speech pledging aid to which two countries?
Greece and Turkey
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.
Q 10Which condemned Nazi leader swallowed cyanide the night before his scheduled Nuremberg hanging?
Hermann Göring
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.
Q 11Who read out Israel's declaration of independence at the Tel Aviv Museum on 14 May 1948?
David Ben-Gurion
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.
Q 12The Zoot Suit Riots of June 1943 between servicemen and young Mexican Americans took place in which city?
Los Angeles
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.
Q 13Which item was the only one still rationed in America after 1945, staying on coupons until June 1947?
Sugar
Q 21ENIAC, the first programmable electronic general-purpose computer, was dedicated in February 1946 at which university?
University of Pennsylvania
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.
Q 22The first working transistor was built in 1947 at which research laboratory?
Bell Labs
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.
Q 23Raytheon's 1947 'Radarange', born of wartime radar work, was the first commercial version of which appliance?
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.
Q 14The Pentagon, built in just 16 months and completed in 1943, stands in which US state?
Virginia
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.
Q 15Mount Rushmore, declared complete in October 1941 after its sculptor died, is in which state?
South Dakota
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.
Q 16Jackie Robinson broke Major League Baseball's colour line at first base for which team on April 15, 1947?
Brooklyn Dodgers
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.
Q 17The first post-war Summer Olympics, the 'Austerity Games' of 1948, were held in which city?
London
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.
Q 18Which aircraft was Chuck Yeager flying when he broke the sound barrier on October 14, 1947?
Bell X-1
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.
Q 19Thor Heyerdahl's 1947 Kon-Tiki expedition crossed the Pacific on a raft built mainly from what?
Balsa logs
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.
Q 20Balloon debris that the US Army first announced as a captured 'flying disc' in July 1947 was found near which town?
Roswell
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.
Microwave oven
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.
Q 24Which company, founded by Edwin Land, put the first instant camera on sale in 1948?
Polaroid
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.
Q 25Which toy did engineer Richard James demonstrate at Gimbels in 1945, selling 400 in 90 minutes?
Slinky
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.
Q 26Which 1940s kitchen brand sold poorly until buyers were shown how to 'burp' its lids?
Tupperware
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.
Q 27Louis Réard's 1946 swimsuit was named the bikini after an atoll where what had just happened?
A public nuclear bomb test
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.
Q 28Which breakfast cereal of 1941 later dropped two letters from its name?
Cheerios
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.
Q 29Which fastener did George de Mestral devise after picking burrs off his dog in 1941?
Velcro
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.
Q 30Candy Land was designed in 1948 by schoolteacher Eleanor Abbott while she recovered from which illness?
Polio
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.