50 Fun Facts About 1945

Which team's World Series, its last for 71 years, saw a tavern owner's goat ejected from its ballpark?

The Chicago Cubs lost that series to the Detroit Tigers and did not win a pennant again until 2016, when the 'Curse of the Billy Goat' supposedly laid by William Sianis finally lifted.

Which New York skyscraper was hit by a B-25 bomber lost in thick fog on 28 July, killing fourteen people?

The Empire State Building was hit after the pilot, advised not to try landing in the fog, flew on over midtown Manhattan; eleven of the fourteen killed were inside.

Which two royals joined the VE night crowds outside Buckingham Palace incognito?

Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret wandered among the crowds unrecognised, an escapade the 2015 film A Royal Night Out stretched into a whole evening of adventures.

Which David Lean film, shot at Carnforth station with Celia Johnson as a suburban wife, reached cinemas in November?

Brief Encounter was shot at Carnforth in February 1945, as wartime planners judged the Lancashire junction far enough from the big cities to film there safely.

Which guitarist, born in Ripley, Surrey, on 30 March, grew up believing his mother was his older sister?

Eric Clapton was nine when his mother came back, married to a Canadian soldier, and it left him withdrawn and neglecting school.

Which actress, born in Hammersmith on 26 July, later won an Oscar for playing Elizabeth II?

Helen Mirren's father Vasily Mironoff came from exiled Russian nobility and played viola in the London Philharmonic before the war; her Academy Award came for The Queen.

Which reggae star was born on 6 February at his grandfather's farm in Nine Mile, Jamaica, to a white Jamaican father?

Bob Marley left Nine Mile with his mother at 12 for Trenchtown in Kingston, where he formed a vocal group with Bunny Wailer and Peter Tosh.

Which children's heroine won a publisher's competition and came out in November, illustrated by Ingrid Vang Nyman?

Pippi Longstocking had been turned down by the publisher Bonniers before it won first prize in Rabén and Sjögren's competition.

Which Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, opened in April, gave Liverpool FC its anthem 'You'll Never Walk Alone'?

Carousel moved Ferenc Molnár's Budapest play Liliom to the Maine coast; Gerry and the Pacemakers' 1963 number one made the song a fixture before Liverpool home matches.

Which actress, absent from the screen for nearly two years, made her comeback in Mildred Pierce and won Best Actress?

Joan Crawford missed the ceremony, reportedly ill, and accepted her Oscar in bed, and the film added a murder plot absent from James M. Cain's novel.

Which Norwegian collaborator was shot at Akershus Fortress on 24 October?

Vidkun Quisling's name was turned into a common noun for traitor by The Times, and the firing squad did its work at 02:40.

Which SS chief, caught in disguise, bit a cyanide capsule in British custody on 23 May?

Heinrich Himmler gave away who he was two days after his arrest, and his body was buried in an unmarked grave near Lüneburg.

Which Argentine colonel, jailed by army rivals, was freed after workers packed the Plaza de Mayo on 17 October?

Juan Perón married the actress Eva Duarte within days, and Peronists still celebrate the rally as Loyalty Day; he won the presidency the following February.

Who proclaimed Vietnam's independence in Hanoi on 2 September, quoting the American Declaration of Independence?

Ho Chi Minh had read a draft to OSS officer Archimedes Patti, who suggested corrections to its opening line; war with France broke out the following year.

Which British territory, occupied by Germany since 1940, was liberated by HMS Bulldog on 9 May, the day after VE Day?

The Channel Islands were cut off after D-Day, and by that winter islanders were near starvation until the Red Cross ship Vega brought food parcels.

Which former prime minister, the last Liberal to hold the office, died on 26 March?

David Lloyd George, who had fought the House of Lords over his 1909 People's Budget, accepted an earldom in his last months.

Which economist led Britain's talks for the US loan that took until 2006 to repay?

John Maynard Keynes negotiated the loan in poor health, months before his death in April 1946.

Which clergyman's 1945 book The Three Railway Engines began the series that produced Thomas the Tank Engine?

Wilbert Awdry's engines first ran in 1945 but Thomas himself only arrived in the second book, in 1946; Awdry wrote 26 books before retiring in 1972 and his son Christopher added 16 more.

What did Britons call the temporary homes put up on bomb sites after the Second World War?

Prefabs were a stopgap for families who had lost their homes to bombing, yet many were still being lived in decades after they were due to come down.

Which surrealist painter designed the dream sequence for Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound, starring Ingrid Bergman?

Salvador Dalí's designs ran so long and complicated once filmed that producer David O. Selznick had most of the footage cut; Miklós Rózsa's theremin-laced score won the Oscar.

In Anchors Aweigh, Gene Kelly dances with which animated character, borrowed from MGM's own cartoon unit?

Jerry Mouse, voiced by Sara Berner, plays a mouse king who has outlawed singing and dancing in his kingdom until Kelly's sailor cheers him up.

Which Billy Wilder film, with Ray Milland as an alcoholic writer on a binge, won Best Picture for 1945?

The Lost Weekend also shared the Grand Prix at the first Cannes Film Festival in 1946, a double not repeated until Marty in 1955 and then not again until Parasite in 2019.

Which 1945 US box-office champion starred Bing Crosby as a priest and Ingrid Bergman as a nun?

The Bells of St. Mary's follows the priest and the nun as they try to save their school from being shut down, and it took $8 million in North America on its first run.

Which cartoon ghost debuted in a 1945 Paramount Noveltoon?

Casper's rights were sold to Paramount's Famous Studios for about $200, and the ghost became one of the studio's most popular cartoon series.

Which emperor's 15 August radio address announcing surrender let ordinary Japanese hear their ruler's voice for the first time?

Hirohito had reportedly never been heard by ordinary Japanese, and the night before, rebel officers searched the palace for his recorded speech but never found it.

In which city were the bodies of Mussolini and Clara Petacci dumped in the Piazzale Loreto for a crowd to abuse?

Milan's Piazzale Loreto was where fifteen men had been shot in August 1944, and Mussolini is said to have remarked, 'for the blood of Piazzale Loreto, we shall pay dearly'.

Which camp near Munich, opened as one of the Nazis' first in 1933, was liberated by American troops on 29 April?

Dachau opened on 22 March 1933 and was the longest-running of all the camps; so many units reached its sub-camps that several US divisions are officially credited as liberators.

Who read Indonesia's two-sentence proclamation of independence in Jakarta on 17 August, days after Japan's surrender?

Sukarno read it with Mohammad Hatta at his side before the red-and-white flag was raised; the Netherlands only recognised 17 August 1945 as the date of independence in 2023.

Which Pulitzer-winning war correspondent was killed by enemy fire on Ie Shima on 18 April?

Ernie Pyle was killed when he raised his head to check on the others in his jeep party, and he was later reburied at Honolulu's Punchbowl cemetery.

Which science-fiction author proposed geostationary communications satellites in Wireless World in October?

Arthur C. Clarke's paper 'Extra-Terrestrial Relays' described the orbit 35,786 km up that is now sometimes called the Clarke orbit in his honour.

Which Michigan city became the first in the world to add fluoride to its drinking water?

Grand Rapids was the test city in a study planned to run 15 years, and its children's tooth decay fell by at least half.

Whose July essay 'As We May Think' described the memex, a microfilm desk that anticipated hypertext?

Vannevar Bush's essay reached Navy radar technician Douglas Engelbart through Life's September reprint, and Engelbart later wrote to Bush that it had shaped his own work.

Which Dutch doctor's artificial kidney, built with sausage casings in wartime Kampen, saved its first patient?

Willem Kolff lost patient after patient on the machine until 1945, when a 67-year-old woman survived her treatment; he later worked on artificial hearts in America.

Which Austrian physicist, nominated by Einstein, won the Nobel Prize for his exclusion principle on electrons?

Wolfgang Pauli was so notorious for experiments failing when he walked in that colleagues named the 'Pauli effect' after him, a reputation he relished.

Which Ealing horror anthology, starring Michael Redgrave, inspired Fred Hoyle's steady-state theory of the universe?

Dead of Night's circular plot led Thomas Gold to ask Hoyle and Hermann Bondi, 'What if the universe is like that?', and the trio's steady-state papers followed in 1948.

Which Austrian composer, outside smoking in Mittersill on 15 September, was shot dead by an American soldier?

Anton Webern walked into a black-market sting aimed at his son-in-law, and the American soldier, Raymond Bell, shot him by mistake.

Which Benjamin Britten opera about a Suffolk fisherman reopened Sadler's Wells on 7 June, a month after VE Day?

Peter Grimes was conceived while Britten was living in America, where reading George Crabbe's poem about the Suffolk coast made him so homesick he resolved to return.

Whose Ninth Symphony, meant to hail the victory, premiered in Leningrad in November?

Dmitri Shostakovich predicted that 'musicians will like to play it, and critics will delight in blasting it'; a 1946 article duly dismissed it as 'playful, filigree-trimmed trifles'.

Which Evelyn Waugh novel is told by Captain Charles Ryder, billeted with his unit at a requisitioned stately home?

Brideshead Revisited was written after Evelyn Waugh fractured a leg in parachute training and was granted unpaid army leave to write it in seclusion.

Which golfer won 11 consecutive PGA tournaments and 18 in one year?

Byron Nelson was nicknamed 'Lord Byron' after the poet, for his gentlemanly conduct, and his 52 PGA Tour wins include five majors.

Which Soviet club's unbeaten November tour of Britain provoked George Orwell's essay 'The Sporting Spirit'?

Dynamo Moscow drew 2–2 with Rangers to finish the tour unbeaten, and Orwell concluded that serious sport was 'war minus the shooting'.

Which Australian pilot, later a Test all-rounder, hit 185 for the Dominions at Lord's in August?

Keith Miller once made a detour on a flight over Germany just to fly over Bonn, because it was Beethoven's birthplace.

Which Asian leader, born on 19 June, was two when her independence-hero father was assassinated?

Aung San Suu Kyi's father founded the modern Burmese army and negotiated independence from Britain in 1947, only to be killed by rivals that same year; she won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991.

Which one-armed outfielder played 77 games for the St. Louis Browns, batting .218 in his only big-league season?

Pete Gray caught the ball, tucked his glove under his right stump and rolled the ball across his chest into his hand to throw; the Browns had paid Memphis $20,000 for him.

Which Soviet cipher clerk left the Ottawa embassy on 5 September with documents exposing a spy ring?

Igor Gouzenko was at first turned away by Canada's Department of Justice and only given asylum against the prime minister's wishes; he later appeared on television with a hood over his head.

Whom did Hitler marry in the Berlin bunker on 29 April, a day before they killed themselves together?

Eva Braun was 33 and Hitler 56; one of the cyanide capsules was tested on his German Shepherd Blondi, which died.

Which Orwell book did Secker and Warburg publish in August, after other publishers had turned it down?

Animal Farm had been dropped by Jonathan Cape on the advice of the Ministry of Information, which feared the satire would offend Britain's Soviet ally.

What was the free civilian outfit issued to discharged British servicemen called, with Burtons a main supplier?

The demob suit's supplier Montague Burton is one claimed origin of the phrase 'the full monty', meaning everything or a complete set.

Which car maker's bomb-damaged German factory did British Army Major Ivan Hirst get running again after VE Day?

Volkswagen's Wolfsburg factory was back in business after Hirst showed the British Army a Beetle painted green and won an order for 20,000 cars.

Which RAF airlift dropped 7,000 tonnes of food on the starving occupied Netherlands from 29 April to 7 May?

Operation Manna sent Lancasters in at very low altitude with German guns trained on them; the American follow-up was Operation Chowhound, and about 20,000 Dutch had already starved.