Coast Guard Trivia
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99 free Coast Guard trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The Coast Guard is the smallest of the US armed forces and the one most people know least about. These 46 Coast Guard trivia questions cover the whole story: Alexander Hamilton's ten revenue cutters in 1790, the 1915 merger with the Life-Saving Service, the Rum War and the Hooligan Navy, the Matchbox Fleet at Normandy, Douglas Munro at Guadalcanal, the SPARS, the Pendleton rescue that became The Finest Hours, the 33,500 people pulled from Katrina's floodwaters, and the rescue swimmers, Jayhawks, Dolphins, icebreakers and National Security Cutters of today. It also asks about the barque Eagle, the Academy in New London, boot camp at Cape May, Base Kodiak, the International Ice Patrol born from the Titanic, the 64-degree racing stripe, and how the coast guards of Britain, Canada and Japan differ from America's. Easy questions suit anyone with a Coastie in the family; the hard ones are for veterans and history buffs. Every answer is checked against Wikipedia, Coast Guard history sources and primary records, and each question shows its source once you answer.
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Q 01Which Founding Father persuaded Congress in 1790 to fund the ten cutters that grew into the Coast Guard?
Alexander Hamilton
Alexander Hamilton asked for ten armed cutters to make sure ships paid the import duties that funded the young government.
Q 02In 2022 the Coast Guard's Admiral Linda Fagan became the first woman to do what?
Lead a US armed service
Lead a US armed service: Fagan took over as commandant in June 2022 and held the post until the incoming Trump administration removed her in January 2025.
Q 03The modern Coast Guard was created on 28 January 1915 by merging the revenue cutters with which agency?
The Life-Saving Service
The Life-Saving Service ordered its beach crews to keep trying until a rescue was proved impossible, which is where the surfmen's saying came from: 'You have to go out, but you don't have to come back.'
Q 04What is the Coast Guard's Latin motto?
Semper Paratus
Semper Paratus means 'Always Ready'; nobody knows exactly how the service came to choose it, but in the 1920s one of its own captains set the phrase to music as the Coast Guard's marching song.
Q 05Which federal department has the Coast Guard operated under in peacetime since 2003?
Homeland Security
Homeland Security took in the Coast Guard when the department opened in 2003 after the September 11 attacks, leaving it the only armed service outside the Defense Department.
Q 06Which cabinet department was the Coast Guard's peacetime home for its first 177 years, until 1967?
Department of the Treasury
Department of the Treasury: the first cutters existed to make ships pay customs duties, so the service answered to the department that collected the money.
Q 07As of 2025, which is the only US armed service with fewer members than the Coast Guard?
The Space Force
The Space Force, created in 2019, has far fewer uniformed members than the Coast Guard's 40,000 or so on active duty; until then the Coast Guard had been the smallest armed service.
Q 08Douglas Munro, the Coast Guard's only Medal of Honor recipient, died shielding Marines in which 1942 campaign?
Guadalcanal
Guadalcanal: Munro led the landing craft that pulled Chesty Puller's cut-off Marines off the beach, and a shipmate said his dying words were 'Did they get off?'
Q 09Douglas Munro, the Coast Guard's only Medal of Honor recipient, grew up in Washington state but was born in which country?
Canada
Canada: he was born in Vancouver to an American father, and after he was killed his mother Edith joined the Coast Guard herself and rose to lieutenant.
Q 10The Coast Guard training ship Eagle was originally built in 1936 for which navy?
Germany's
Germany's navy trained cadets aboard her as the Horst Wessel; taken as a war prize, she was sailed to America in 1946 by a Coast Guard crew helped by her German sailors.
Q 11Sinbad, the mascot who sailed on the cutter Campbell through World War II, was what kind of animal?
A dog
A dog: the crew enlisted the mixed-breed puppy with his own paperwork and bunk, and he became famous enough for Life magazine stories and a published biography.
Q 12In which Connecticut city is the United States Coast Guard Academy?
New London
New London: the academy began afloat, as a class of cadets aboard a schooner, moved to the city's Fort Trumbull in 1910, and in 1932 to its present campus up the river.
Q 13What sets Coast Guard Academy admission apart from the other US service academies?
It requires no congressional nomination
Q 21The International Ice Patrol, founded after the Titanic sank, tracks icebergs on the Grand Banks off which Canadian island?
Newfoundland
Newfoundland: the Titanic struck its iceberg just south of the Grand Banks, and Coast Guard crews still track the bergs that drift into those shipping lanes.
Q 22Which Coast Guard arm was created in 1939 as the 'Reserve' and renamed two years later?
The Auxiliary
The Auxiliary: in 1941 Congress gave the Reserve name to a new military branch of the service, and the civilian volunteers who had carried it became the Auxiliary.
Q 23Which helicopter specialists did the Coast Guard introduce after 31 sailors died when the Marine Electric sank in 1983?
Rescue swimmers
It requires no congressional nomination: every place is won through a nationwide competition, so no senator or representative has to put a cadet's name forward.
Q 14The Coast Guard's only recruit training centre, its boot camp, is in which New Jersey town?
Cape May
Cape May has trained every enlisted recruit since 1982, when the service stopped running a second boot camp on the West Coast at Alameda, California.
Q 15The Coast Guard's diagonal 'racing stripe' came from the firm of which designer, who also restyled Air Force One?
Raymond Loewy
Raymond Loewy's firm proposed the slash to give the Coast Guard a look of its own, because the public it served kept failing to recognise its cutters and aircraft.
Q 16Which president, delighted with his new Air Force One livery, suggested the Coast Guard as the next agency to restyle?
John F. Kennedy
John F. Kennedy made the suggestion to the jet's designer; the stripe that resulted, tilted at 64 degrees, was ordered onto every cutter and aircraft in 1967.
Q 17Coast Guard aviator Elmer Stone co-piloted the Navy seaplane NC-4, which in 1919 made the first flight across what?
The Atlantic Ocean
The Atlantic Ocean: the NC-4 crossed in stages by way of the Azores in May 1919, weeks before Alcock and Brown made the first nonstop crossing that June.
Q 18Which Hollywood costume designer was hired in the 1970s to design the Coast Guard's uniform for women?
Edith Head
Edith Head, winner of eight Oscars for films such as The Sting, was brought in as the number of women in the service grew after they joined the regular Coast Guard in 1973.
Q 19Which 2016 Disney film starring Chris Pine dramatises the Coast Guard's 1952 rescue of the tanker Pendleton's crew?
The Finest Hours
The Finest Hours follows coxswain Bernie Webber, who took three men out in a small lifeboat after a storm snapped the tanker in two and trapped more than 30 sailors in its sinking stern.
Q 20In 1952 four Coast Guardsmen in a small lifeboat saved 32 tanker crewmen off which cape?
Cape Cod
Cape Cod: coxswain Bernard Webber took the CG 36500 out from Chatham in a winter storm and squeezed aboard 32 of the 33 men on the tanker's stern, earning all four of the crew the Coast Guard's top rescue medal.
Rescue swimmers: that night a Navy helicopter had to bring a swimmer to reach men in the freezing sea, and an inquiry found the Coast Guard alone could not put anyone in the water from the air.
Q 24Which 2006 film starred Kevin Costner as a Coast Guard instructor and Ashton Kutcher as his trainee?
The Guardian
The Guardian was filmed partly at the Coast Guard's own air station in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, dressed with fake snow to pass for a far-northern base, with off-duty Coast Guard members as extras.
Q 25The Coast Guard icebreaker Healy became in 2015 the first unaccompanied US surface vessel to reach where?
The North Pole
The North Pole: Healy made the trip unescorted, arriving on 5 September 2015 with scientists who took thousands of water and ice samples; on her first visit she had sailed in company with another icebreaker.
Q 26The icebreaker Polar Star breaks a channel each year to resupply which Antarctic base?
McMurdo Station
McMurdo Station gets its year's food and fuel by freighter through the channel she cuts each summer; to open it Polar Star can back up and ram through ice 21 feet thick.
Q 27The Coast Guard's MH-65 Dolphin helicopter is a variant of an aircraft from which country?
France
France: the Dolphin is Aerospatiale's Dauphin with its name translated, though the Coast Guard's were assembled in Texas with American engines and avionics.
Q 28The Coast Guard's MH-60 rescue helicopter belongs to the same Sikorsky family as which Army helicopter?
The Black Hawk
The Black Hawk: the Coast Guard's Jayhawk descends from the Army machine by way of the Navy's Seahawk, and in 1990 it began taking over from the ageing HH-3F Pelican.
Q 29A Coast Guard vessel 65 feet or longer is a cutter; what is anything shorter officially called?
A boat
A boat: a cutter must also have a crew living aboard; the word was borrowed from a small single-masted English sailing vessel and stuck to the service's larger ships whatever their type.
Q 30The Coast Guard's Legend-class National Security Cutters were built at Pascagoula, in which Gulf Coast state?
Mississippi
Mississippi: the Ingalls yard at Pascagoula, which also builds Navy destroyers, turned out the Legend class to replace the service's twelve ageing high-endurance cutters.