147 Fun Facts About World War 2

Operation Weserübung, launched on 9 April 1940, was the German invasion of which two countries?

Denmark and Norway were invaded on 9 April 1940 to secure Germany's supply of Swedish iron ore, shipped through the port of Narvik; Denmark gave in within hours, while Norway held out until June.

Which of these was one of the "Big Four" Allied powers of World War II?

China was the fourth of Roosevelt's 'Four Policemen', the powers he wanted to enforce the post-war peace, which is how it gained a permanent seat on the UN Security Council.

Which country did German troops march into on 12 March 1938, in the union known as the Anschluss?

Austria's Chancellor Schuschnigg, browbeaten by Hitler at Berchtesgaden a month earlier, had called a vote on independence for 13 March; the invasion came the day before it.

Which October 1944 engagement is often called the largest naval battle of World War II?

The Battle of Leyte Gulf nearly went wrong for the US: a decoy carrier force lured Admiral Halsey's fleet north, leaving the invasion shipping guarded only by escort carriers and destroyers.

Which Eastern Front clash of massive urban fighting is often called the turning point against Nazi Germany?

The Battle of Stalingrad ended after Hitler promoted the trapped Friedrich Paulus to field marshal, expecting him to die fighting; Paulus surrendered instead, along with some 91,000 men.

Which German dive bomber, notorious for its screaming sirens, spearheaded the September 1939 invasion of Poland?

Stuka is short for Sturzkampfflugzeug, German for 'dive bomber'; the Junkers Ju 87's howl in a dive was no accident but came from sirens fitted to terrify people on the ground.

Who served as Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe on D-Day?

Dwight D. Eisenhower put the invasion back a day for bad weather, then pencilled a note for release if it failed: 'If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.'

What was the code name for the Allied invasion of Normandy that began on D-Day in June 1944?

Operation Overlord was shielded by an elaborate deception: fake equipment, a phantom army and bogus radio traffic persuaded Germany that the main landing would come at the Pas-de-Calais.

Which August 1939 pact secretly divided Eastern Europe between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union?

The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, named for the foreign ministers who signed it, promised ten years of peace while a secret protocol carved up Eastern Europe; Hitler broke it in under two years.

Midway, in June 1942, came one month after which earlier carrier-versus-carrier engagement?

The Battle of the Coral Sea was fought entirely by carrier aircraft, the two fleets never sighting each other, and it left two Japanese carriers unfit to fight at Midway a month later.

Which Prime Minister led Britain into the war in September 1939 and resigned in May 1940?

Neville Chamberlain announced the declaration of war by radio on 3 September 1939 and resigned on 10 May 1940, the day Germany struck in the west, after his Commons majority collapsed.

Which event of November 1938 saw Nazi mobs smash Jewish shops and burn synagogues across Germany?

Kristallnacht left the streets littered with broken glass; the regime staged it to look like spontaneous public anger, then fined Germany's Jews a billion marks.

Who became US president in April 1945 and went on to authorise the atomic bombings of Japan?

Harry S. Truman had been vice president for less than three months and had never been told about the atomic bomb project until after he was sworn in as president.

Which country stayed out of the war yet sent the 'Blue Division' to fight for Germany in Russia?

Spain's dictator Franco had won his civil war with German and Italian help; he sent tens of thousands of volunteers to the Eastern Front while keeping his country officially out of the war.

Pearl Harbor, attacked by Japan in December 1941, lies on which Hawaiian island?

Oahu's radar operators spotted the incoming planes nearly an hour before the attack, but the report was waved away as a flight of American B-17 bombers expected that morning.

Which city was the main target of the Blitz, Germany's sustained bombing campaign of 1940–41?

London was bombed from September 1940 to May 1941, and thousands of its people slept each night on the platforms of Underground stations.

The post-war trials of Nazi war criminals were held at the Palace of Justice in which city?

Nuremberg's Palace of Justice was chosen partly because it was relatively intact and had an attached prison, though the tribunal's permanent seat was Berlin.

What was the name of the largest Nazi concentration and extermination camp?

Auschwitz was a complex of more than 40 camps where about 1.1 million people were murdered; Soviet troops freed the 7,000 prisoners left behind on 27 January 1945, now Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Who was the Emperor of Japan during World War II?

Hirohito announced the surrender in a radio broadcast on 15 August 1945, reportedly the first time ordinary Japanese had ever heard their emperor's voice.

Which English city lost its medieval cathedral in the German raid code-named 'Moonlight Sonata' in November 1940?

Coventry was hit on the night of 14 November 1940 in a raid aimed at its factories; the roofless shell of its old cathedral still stands beside the new one built after the war.

The Soviet invasion of which country on 30 November 1939 began the Winter War?

Finland held off a far larger Red Army for more than three months before signing the Moscow Peace Treaty in March 1940 and giving up the Karelian Isthmus.

Which American bomber dropped the first atomic bomb used in war, in August 1945?

Enola Gay was named by pilot Paul Tibbets after his mother, only hours before take-off; three days later the same plane flew as weather scout for the second atomic mission.

Which signal reported that the Pearl Harbor attack had achieved surprise?

'Tora! Tora! Tora!' was sent by the raid's air commander, Mitsuo Fuchida, who became a Christian after the war and toured the United States as an evangelist.

Which German field marshal earned the nickname 'Desert Fox' for his command of German and Italian forces in North Africa?

Erwin Rommel, the Desert Fox, was later implicated in the July 1944 plot against Hitler and chose to take cyanide rather than face a public trial that could have endangered his family.

Which British codebreaker devised the Bombe, a machine for finding each day's German cipher settings?

Alan Turing's Bombe built on the 'bomba' of Polish codebreakers, among them Marian Rejewski, who had first reconstructed the German military cipher machine back in 1932.

The February 1945 Yalta Conference took place on which peninsula?

Crimea's resort of Yalta was Stalin's choice: he insisted his doctors had barred him from long journeys, so Roosevelt and Churchill had to make the trip to him.

What was the codename for Nazi Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941?

Operation Barbarossa, named after a medieval German emperor, tore up the non-aggression pact that Hitler had signed with Moscow less than two years earlier.

In his first Commons speech as Prime Minister, Churchill offered Britain nothing but 'blood, toil, tears and' what?

Sweat ended the line Churchill delivered on 13 May 1940, three days after taking office; asked what his aim was, he answered in the same speech: 'victory at all costs'.

Which July-August 1945 conference brought the 'Big Three' together over defeated Germany and the post-war order?

The Potsdam Conference ran from 17 July to 2 August 1945 at the Cecilienhof palace; Churchill was replaced mid-conference by Clement Attlee after losing the British general election.

Which term names the German tactic of fast armoured thrusts backed by close air support?

Blitzkrieg means 'lightning war'; for all its fame, the German army never officially adopted the word as a military doctrine.

Which American airman led sixteen B-25 bombers off a carrier's deck to bomb Japan in April 1942?

Jimmy Doolittle's bombers could not land back on the carrier, so they flew on to the Asian mainland, where all but one crew crash-landed or bailed out as fuel ran dry; he came home to the Medal of Honor.

Operation Dynamo in 1940 rescued some 338,000 Allied troops from the beaches of which French port?

Dunkirk's planners hoped to save perhaps 45,000 men; hundreds of civilian 'little ships' helped lift more than seven times that number between 26 May and 4 June 1940.

What was the codename of the secret US programme that built the first atomic bombs?

The Manhattan Project took its name from the Army's Manhattan Engineer District, first based in New York City, though most of the work was done elsewhere, notably at Los Alamos in New Mexico.

The RAF's success in the Battle of Britain led Hitler to shelve which planned amphibious assault?

Operation Sea Lion needed command of the air over the Channel before any invasion fleet could cross; with the RAF undefeated, Hitler postponed it on 17 September 1940 and it was never launched.

Which Japanese city was the target of the first atomic bomb dropped in warfare?

Hiroshima was struck by the uranium bomb 'Little Boy' on 6 August 1945; three days later, cloud over Kokura sent the second bomber on to its backup target, Nagasaki.

Which Hebrew word meaning 'catastrophe' is widely used as a name for the Holocaust?

Shoah also names Israel's memorial day, Yom HaShoah, whose spring date was chosen to fall within the anniversary of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto uprising, so that it honours resistance as well as loss.

Operation Torch, in November 1942, was an Allied invasion of which region?

French North Africa was held by Vichy French forces, who fired on the landings in Morocco and Algeria until their commander, Admiral Darlan, ordered a ceasefire on 10 November 1942.

Which 1941 law let the United States, not yet at war, supply Britain and its allies with weapons and food?

The Lend-Lease Act was sold to Americans with a homely image: Roosevelt likened it to lending a neighbour your garden hose when his house is on fire and getting it back once the fire is out.

The September 1938 Munich Agreement ceded which region of Czechoslovakia to Germany?

The Sudetenland was signed away at Munich by Britain, France, Italy and Germany with no Czechoslovak at the table; within six months Hitler's troops had occupied the rest of the Czech lands.

The Japanese military's wartime 'comfort women' system forced women and girls into what?

Sexual slavery was the system's purpose: women, many of them from Korea, were abducted or lured with false offers of nursing and factory jobs and then held in military 'comfort stations'.

The 'Phoney War' followed the invasion of Poland and ended with which major German offensive?

The Battle of France began on 10 May 1940, ending eight months so uneventful that British newspapers nicknamed them the 'Bore War' and the French the drôle de guerre.

Which capital was liberated on 25 August 1944 after four years of German occupation?

Paris was freed almost intact: Hitler had ordered the city left in ruins, but its German commander, Dietrich von Choltitz, surrendered without carrying the order out.

Mussolini's Italy invaded which African country in October 1935, an act of aggression that exposed the League of Nations' weakness?

Ethiopia's emperor, Haile Selassie, appealed in vain to the League of Nations, which lifted its half-hearted sanctions on Italy in July 1936, weeks after his capital fell.

What was the name of the German air force during World War II?

The Luftwaffe was built up in secret, because the Treaty of Versailles had banned Germany from having an air force; Hitler unveiled it openly in 1935 with Hermann Göring in command.

Japan's formal surrender was signed aboard a battleship anchored in which bay?

Tokyo Bay's ceremony lasted just 23 minutes; the presiding American general signed with six pens and handed two of them to generals newly freed from Japanese prison camps.

By what name has the Russian city of Stalingrad been known since 1961?

Volgograd got its present name when Khrushchev's de-Stalinisation campaign took the dictator's name off the map; before 1925 the city had been Tsaritsyn.

What was the term for the Japanese suicide attacks by military aviators against Allied naval vessels?

Kamikaze means 'divine wind', after the typhoons said to have scattered the Mongol fleets that tried to invade Japan in 1274 and 1281.

Asking Congress for war, Roosevelt called 7 December 1941 'a date which will live in' what?

Infamy was a late change: Roosevelt's first draft read 'a date which will live in world history' before he reworked the line himself.

The Battle of the Bulge, in December 1944, was Germany's last major offensive in which theatre?

The Western Front offensive drove a bulge into the Allied line; asked to surrender the encircled town of Bastogne, the American commander, Anthony McAuliffe, sent back a one-word reply: 'Nuts!'

Executive Order 9066 of February 1942 led to the mass removal of which group from the US West Coast?

Japanese Americans, two-thirds of them US citizens, were confined in inland camps; in 1988 Congress formally apologised and paid $20,000 to each surviving internee.

Which Normandy beach saw the heaviest Allied casualties on D-Day?

Omaha cost the Americans more than 2,000 casualties, the most of any beach: the bombers overshot the defences, and nearly all of one battalion's amphibious tanks sank before reaching the shore.

Who was Japan's prime minister when it attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941?

Hideki Tojo, an army general, became prime minister on 18 October 1941 and held the post until July 1944; he was hanged as a war criminal in December 1948.

Which US general's Third Army raced across France after the Normandy breakout in 1944?

George S. Patton's Third Army became operational on 1 August 1944 and drove across France to the Moselle within a month; in December it relieved Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge.

On which of the Solomon Islands did US Marines land on 7 August 1942?

Guadalcanal was invaded for its airstrip, which Japan was building within reach of the supply routes to Australia; renamed Henderson Field, it was fought over until Japan evacuated in February 1943.

At which January 1943 conference did Roosevelt announce the demand for 'unconditional surrender'?

Casablanca, in Morocco, hosted Roosevelt and Churchill from 14 to 24 January 1943; Stalin was invited too but stayed at home to direct a major Soviet offensive.

Which German city was devastated by Allied firebombing raids on 13–15 February 1945?

Dresden's firestorm killed up to 25,000 people; among the survivors was the captured American soldier Kurt Vonnegut, who later built his novel Slaughterhouse-Five around the raid.

Who oversaw the Allied occupation of Japan after World War II?

Douglas MacArthur ran occupied Japan as Supreme Commander from 1945 to 1951; in 1946 his staff drafted the country's new constitution, with its clause renouncing war, in under a week.

Joe Rosenthal's flag-raising photo on Mount Suribachi was taken during which 1945 battle?

Rosenthal's photograph, taken during the Battle of Iwo Jima on 23 February 1945, shows the second of two flag-raisings on Mount Suribachi that day; it won the Pulitzer Prize for Photography later that year.

Which US battleship lost 1,177 crew at Pearl Harbor, the most of any ship that day?

USS Arizona exploded after a bomb detonated her forward magazine on 7 December 1941, killing 1,177 of her crew; her wreck is the site of a memorial in Pearl Harbor.

What was the title of Adolf Hitler's political manifesto, first published in 1925?

Mein Kampf was dictated by Hitler in Landsberg prison after the failed 1923 Beer Hall Putsch and published in two volumes in 1925 and 1926; it sold millions of copies under Nazi rule.

The 1944 Warsaw Uprising against German occupation was led by which Polish resistance organisation?

The Home Army (Armia Krajowa) launched the uprising on 1 August 1944 as Soviet forces neared Warsaw; it held out for 63 days before surrendering on 2 October, after which the Germans razed the city.

Who served as Nazi Germany's minister of propaganda from 1933 to 1945?

Joseph Goebbels ran the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda from March 1933; named chancellor in Hitler's will, he held the post for a single day before killing himself in Berlin on 1 May 1945.

Operation Mincemeat, a 1943 British deception, was designed to disguise the invasion of which island?

Sicily was the real target: a corpse dressed as 'Major William Martin' of the Royal Marines was set adrift from a submarine carrying forged letters that pointed elsewhere, and German intelligence took the bait.

Which July 1943 Eastern Front battle is widely called the largest tank battle in history?

The Battle of Kursk was no surprise to the Soviets: warned well in advance, they ringed the salient with minefields and trenches, and after it Germany never regained the initiative in the east.

The two battles of El Alamein in 1942 were fought in the desert of which country?

Egypt's tiny railway halt of El Alamein lay only about 60 miles west of Alexandria; Churchill later wrote, 'Before Alamein we never had a victory. After Alamein we never had a defeat.'

Which German weapon, developed as Aggregat-4, was the world's first practical ballistic missile?

The V-2 rocket, built under Wernher von Braun, took more lives among the camp prisoners forced to make it, at least 10,000, than it did among the people it was fired at.

Which First World War hero became head of state of Vichy France in July 1940?

Philippe Pétain, the victor of Verdun in 1916, was voted full powers by the National Assembly on 10 July 1940 and led the collaborationist Vichy regime until 1944; his 1945 death sentence was commuted to life.

The 1940 massacre of some 22,000 Polish officers and other prisoners is named after which forest?

Katyn Forest, near Smolensk, hid mass graves of Poles shot by the Soviet secret police in spring 1940; Moscow blamed Germany for the killings until it finally admitted responsibility in 1990.

Operation Mercury, in May 1941, was the German airborne invasion of which island?

Crete was seized by German paratroopers and mountain troops between 20 May and 1 June 1941, the first mainly airborne invasion in history; the heavy losses deterred Hitler from further large airborne operations.

In what city did Anne Frank and her family hide during World War II?

Amsterdam's Prinsengracht 263 hid the Franks behind a movable bookcase for just over two years, until their arrest on 4 August 1944; only Anne's father, Otto, survived the camps.

What did the Allies celebrate on 8 May 1945?

Victory in Europe Day followed Germany's surrender, which took effect late on 8 May 1945; by then it was already 9 May in Moscow, which is why Russia celebrates a day later.

Which Soviet commander threw the Germans back from Moscow in winter 1941–42 and accepted their surrender in Berlin in 1945?

Georgy Zhukov came home a national hero, which proved his undoing: Stalin saw so popular a marshal as a threat and soon demoted him to a command in far-off Odessa.

Which German pocket battleship was scuttled off Montevideo in December 1939?

Admiral Graf Spee was scuttled in the River Plate estuary on 17 December 1939, four days after being damaged by three British cruisers in the Battle of the River Plate; her captain, Hans Langsdorff, shot himself.

Which 1942 event forced tens of thousands of American and Filipino POWs to walk to Camp O'Donnell?

The Bataan Death March drove some 75,000 Filipino and American captives about 65 miles to prison camps in April 1942; the Japanese commander, Masaharu Homma, was executed for it in 1946.

Which rotor cipher machine did Germany's army, navy and air force all rely on to scramble their messages?

Enigma began as a commercial product, patented in 1918 and sold to businesses from 1923, years before the German armed forces adopted it.

Mussolini's forces invaded which country from Albania on 28 October 1940?

Greece repelled the Italian invasion launched from Albania on 28 October 1940, a date Greeks mark as Ohi ('No') Day, and Germany had to intervene in April 1941 to conquer the country.

Which January 1942 meeting of senior Nazis in a Berlin suburb coordinated the genocide of Europe's Jews?

The Wannsee Conference of 20 January 1942, chaired by Reinhard Heydrich, lasted only about ninety minutes; of the thirty copies of its minutes, a single one survived, found in German Foreign Office files in 1947.

Aboard which US battleship was Japan's formal surrender signed on 2 September 1945?

USS Missouri displayed a special relic at the ceremony: the flag Commodore Matthew Perry had flown in 1853, when his ships forced Japan to open to the West, was flown out from Annapolis for the day.

Which 1941 declaration by Churchill and Roosevelt set out their aims for the post-war world?

The Atlantic Charter was agreed aboard warships off Newfoundland in August 1941, four months before America entered the war; by January 1942, 26 nations had pledged to uphold it, an early step towards the United Nations.

What term did the Nazis use as a euphemism for exterminating the Jewish population?

'Final Solution' (Endlösung der Judenfrage) was the Nazi euphemism for the genocide of Europe's Jews; Göring's letter of 31 July 1941 ordered Heydrich to prepare a 'total solution of the Jewish question'.

The February 1942 fall of which British base to Japan was Britain's largest surrender ever?

Singapore surrendered on 15 February 1942 to a Japanese army smaller than the garrison it captured; Churchill called it the worst disaster in British military history.

US troops captured the intact Ludendorff Bridge over the Rhine in March 1945 at which town?

Remagen's Ludendorff Bridge was seized by the US 9th Armored Division on 7 March 1945, giving the Allies their first bridgehead across the Rhine; the bridge collapsed ten days later, on 17 March.

Which Soviet city withstood an 872-day siege by German and Finnish forces without ever being captured?

Leningrad was cut off from September 1941 to January 1944; hundreds of thousands starved, and lorries crossing the ice of Lake Ladoga, the 'Road of Life', were its winter lifeline.

Which senior Nazi flew solo to Scotland in May 1941, hoping to negotiate peace?

Rudolf Hess parachuted into Scotland on 10 May 1941, seeking the Duke of Hamilton; he was imprisoned for the rest of his life and died in Spandau prison in 1987, aged 93.

Operation Iceberg, launched on 1 April 1945, was the invasion of which island?

Okinawa cost about 12,000 American and some 100,000 Japanese military lives; it was meant as the springboard for invading Japan itself, a landing that Japan's surrender in August 1945 made unnecessary.

Operation Market Garden in September 1944 failed in its key objective of securing the Rhine bridge at which Dutch city?

Arnhem's road bridge was reached by only a small British airborne force, which held on for four days before being overwhelmed; the story was later told in the book and film A Bridge Too Far.

Troops of which Allied contingent raised their flag over the ruined abbey of Monte Cassino on 18 May 1944?

The Polish II Corps under General Władysław Anders took the heights at its second attempt; on the morning of 18 May 1944 the first flag raised over the ruined monastery was Poland's.

Which English estate was the principal centre of Allied code-breaking in World War II?

Bletchley Park employed nearly 9,000 people by 1945, about three-quarters of them women, and their work stayed an official secret until the mid-1970s.

Who commanded the British Eighth Army at the Second Battle of El Alamein in 1942?

Bernard Montgomery took over the Eighth Army in August 1942 as a second choice after William Gott, the original appointee, was killed when his transport aircraft was shot down; he won at El Alamein in October–November 1942.

Oskar Schindler's enamelware factory was in which Polish city?

Kraków was where Schindler ran his enamelware works, known as Emalia; in late 1944 he moved his Jewish workers to a new plant at Brünnlitz, saving more than 1,000 of them from the death camps.

Whom did Hitler name as his successor as head of state before his suicide in April 1945?

Karl Dönitz, the grand admiral commanding the Kriegsmarine, was named Reichspräsident in Hitler's testament; his Flensburg Government ordered the surrender signed at Reims on 7 May 1945 and was dissolved by the Allies on 23 May.

WWII Marine Corps code talkers are most strongly associated with which Native language?

Navajo code talkers, recruited by the Marine Corps from 1942, rendered 'submarine' as 'iron fish' because the language had no such word; the Japanese never broke the code.

Which Royal Navy battlecruiser did Bismarck sink in the Denmark Strait on 24 May 1941?

HMS Hood blew up after a shell from Bismarck struck near her aft magazines, sinking within about three minutes with only three survivors from 1,418 men; Bismarck was sunk three days later.

Stauffenberg's 20 July 1944 bomb went off at which Hitler headquarters in East Prussia?

The Wolf's Lair (Wolfsschanze) near Rastenburg was where Colonel Heinz Brandt reportedly moved Stauffenberg's briefcase behind a heavy table leg, shielding Hitler, who escaped with singed trousers and a perforated eardrum.

Who designed the bouncing bombs used by 617 Squadron in the 1943 Dambusters Raid?

Barnes Wallis's 'Upkeep' mine, a 9,250 lb drum spun backwards before release, skipped over the dams' torpedo nets and sank against the wall before exploding; the raid of 16–17 May 1943 breached the Möhne and Eder dams.

Operation Bagration (June 1944) destroyed which German formation in Byelorussia?

Army Group Centre lost 28 of its divisions within weeks; to show the world the scale of the victory, some 57,000 of its captured soldiers were paraded through Moscow in July 1944.

Which Japanese admiral, planner of the Pearl Harbor attack, was shot down by American fighters in April 1943?

Isoroku Yamamoto was shot down over Bougainville on 18 April 1943 by P-38 fighters sent to intercept him after American codebreakers deciphered the schedule of his inspection tour.

Britain spread a wartime myth that which vegetable let RAF night-fighter pilots see in the dark?

Carrots were a cover story: the real reason RAF crews could find German bombers at night was newly fitted airborne radar.

Which soft drink was created in Nazi Germany after a wartime embargo cut off Coca-Cola syrup?

Fanta was first mixed from wartime leftovers such as whey and apple pomace, the only ingredients Coca-Cola's German boss Max Keith could get.

Which everyday food did US officials ban for seven weeks in 1943 as a wartime conservation measure?

Sliced bread was banned because officials said a pre-cut loaf needed heavier wrapping to keep it from drying out. The savings proved smaller than expected and the order was dropped that March.

Wojtek, an enlisted army private said to have carried artillery shells in the Italian campaign, was what kind of animal?

A brown bear, Wojtek was put on the army's books because the troopship to Italy forbade pets and mascots. He drank beer with his unit, rose to corporal and retired to Edinburgh Zoo.

Which children's author helped write the US Army's 'Private Snafu' cartoons for World War II troops?

Dr. Seuss wrote under his real name, Theodor Geisel, about a bungling soldier created by film director Frank Capra and voiced by Mel Blanc.

Which future Hollywood star survived the 1944–45 Dutch famine as a teenager, when her family ate tulip bulbs?

Audrey Hepburn's family ground tulip bulbs into flour for cakes and biscuits. Malnutrition left her gravely ill with jaundice and anaemia by the time the war ended.

Which British royal trained as a driver and mechanic in the wartime Auxiliary Territorial Service?

Princess Elizabeth was 18 when she joined as an honorary second subaltern. Five months later she was made an honorary junior commander, the equal of a captain.

Project X-Ray was a US plan to strap tiny timed firebombs to which animals and release them over Japan?

Bats roost in eaves and attics, so each was meant to carry its incendiary into a wooden building. In a 1943 test, armed bats released by accident set a New Mexico air base on fire.

Which B-29 bomber, named after pilot Paul Tibbets's mother, dropped the first atomic bomb used in war?

Enola Gay got its name hours before take-off, when Tibbets had it painted under the pilot's window. The plane's usual commander, Robert Lewis, was furious to find it there.

Japanese officer Hiroo Onoda kept fighting World War II in which country's jungle until 1974?

Philippines islanders left notes and aircraft dropped leaflets saying the war was over, but Onoda took them for a trick. He gave up only when his old commanding officer flew in to relieve him of duty.

Which icon of American women's wartime factory work first appeared as the heroine of a 1942 hit song?

Rosie the Riveter is often wrongly identified with the 'We Can Do It!' poster, a Westinghouse morale notice that only became famous in the 1980s.

Which physicist directed the secret Los Alamos laboratory where the first atomic bombs were designed and built?

J. Robert Oppenheimer proposed the site himself: a flat mesa near Santa Fe that he knew well, then home to a private boys' ranch school.

Which mathematician, a founding father of computer science, designed Britain's wartime code-breaking 'bombe' machine?

Alan Turing ran Hut 8, the team reading German naval signals. Prosecuted in 1952 over a relationship with another man, he was granted a royal pardon in 2013.

Which French general broadcast an appeal to fight on from a BBC studio on 18 June 1940?

Charles de Gaulle was then an obscure brigadier general, and very few people in France heard the speech. The BBC did not even keep the recording.

Whom did Nazi Germany's dictator marry in a Berlin bunker less than 40 hours before they both died by suicide?

Eva Braun never appeared with him in public as a couple, so much of the German public learned of the relationship only after their deaths.

Which future US president commanded torpedo boat PT-109 when a Japanese destroyer rammed and sank it in 1943?

John F. Kennedy, once on Harvard's swim team, towed a badly burned crewman to an island by clenching the man's life-jacket strap in his teeth. The swim took five hours.

Which neutral European country officially referred to World War II as 'The Emergency'?

Ireland stayed neutral throughout, and although its emergency powers lapsed in 1946, the state of emergency itself was not formally ended until 1976.

Which island group was the only British territory in Europe occupied by German forces during World War II?

The Channel Islands had been demilitarised, though the news was held back and the Germans approached with caution. Liberation did not come until 9 May 1945.

Which American big-band leader went missing on a military flight from England to France in December 1944?

Glenn Miller had walked away from about $20,000 a week with his civilian band to join up at 38, when he was unlikely ever to be drafted.

Which 1939 British morale poster was rarely displayed and became famous only after a bookshop rediscovered it in 2000?

Keep Calm and Carry On ran to 2.45 million copies, but stocks were pulped in 1940 for paper salvage. Stuart Manley of Barter Books in Alnwick found one in a box of auction books.

Which RAF fighter shot down more German aircraft in the Battle of Britain than the more famous Spitfire?

The Hawker Hurricane caused 60% of German losses in the battle. Its old-fashioned wood-and-fabric covering had an upside: cannon shells could pass right through without exploding.

Which Nazi leader, head of the SS from 1929, tried to go into hiding but was captured by British forces?

Heinrich Himmler held a rank equal to an army field marshal as Reichsführer-SS. He killed himself with cyanide in British custody on 23 May 1945.

What was the name of Nazi Germany's secret police, created by Hermann Göring in Prussia in 1933?

Gestapo was coined by a post office clerk, who shortened Geheime Staatspolizei so that it would fit on a franking stamp.

Which nickname did the Tuskegee Airmen, America's first Black military pilots, earn from their fighters' paint?

Red Tails came from the crimson markings on the 332nd Fighter Group's aircraft. Flying from Italy, the group escorted heavy bombers as far as Germany and back.

Which US cruiser was sunk by a Japanese submarine in July 1945, days after delivering atomic bomb parts to Tinian?

USS Indianapolis sank in 12 minutes, and the Navy did not learn of it for four days. Of about 890 men left adrift among sharks, only 316 survived.

Which Mediterranean island was awarded the George Cross in 1942 for its people's heroism under Axis bombing?

Malta, then a British colony, received the medal with a handwritten letter from King George VI. The cross has appeared on the island's flag since 1943.

Which Texan, hailed as America's most decorated combat soldier of World War II, later starred in Hollywood westerns?

Audie Murphy was turned down by the Army, Navy and Marines for being underweight and underage, until his sister signed an affidavit falsifying his birth date.

Which admiral took command of the US Pacific Fleet on a submarine's deck soon after the attack on Pearl Harbor?

Chester Nimitz, a submariner early in his career, took command aboard the submarine Grayling on 31 December 1941. All eight battleships in the harbour during the attack had been sunk or damaged.

Germany's Me 262, far faster than any Allied fighter in 1944, was the first operational fighter powered by what?

Jet engines made it about 150 km/h faster than any Allied fighter over Europe, so Allied pilots learned to catch it on the ground or during take-off and landing.

What code name was given to the two prefabricated harbours towed from England to Normandy after D-Day?

Mulberry harbours were built in under a year in great secrecy. A violent storm on 19 June 1944 wrecked the American one beyond repair, leaving only the British harbour at Arromanches.

In which unusual venue, the site of Germany's 1918 armistice, did France sign its own armistice in June 1940?

A train carriage, in fact a dining car, was taken from its museum and put back on the exact spot in the Forest of Compiègne where it had stood in 1918. The SS destroyed it near the war's end.

Agents trained in Britain fatally wounded SS leader Reinhard Heydrich in May 1942 in which occupied capital?

Prague knew Heydrich as 'the Butcher', and he died of his wounds eight days after the attack. In reprisal, SS troops destroyed the village of Lidice.

Yevgeny Khaldei's famous photograph of 2 May 1945 shows Soviet soldiers raising a flag over which Berlin building?

The Reichstag shot was staged with passing soldiers and a flag Khaldei's uncle had sewn from three tablecloths. It was later altered to remove a watch from one soldier's right wrist.

Which Reserve Army emergency plan did Claus von Stauffenberg and fellow plotters rewrite to seize power in July 1944?

Operation Valkyrie was meant to restore order after heavy bombing or a revolt by forced labourers. The plotters meant to trick the Reserve Army into arresting the regime by blaming a coup on the SS.

At which besieged Belgian town did US General Anthony McAuliffe answer a German surrender demand with the word 'Nuts!'?

Bastogne's defenders, built around the 101st Airborne Division, were surrounded and short of food, ammunition and winter gear. American tanks opened a corridor to them on 26 December.

Which Australian town did Japanese bombers hit in February 1942 in the largest foreign attack ever made on Australia?

Darwin was struck by four of the six aircraft carriers that had raided Pearl Harbor, with the first wave led by the same flight commander, Mitsuo Fuchida.

Which British colony in Asia fell to Japan on a day still remembered there as 'Black Christmas'?

Hong Kong's governor surrendered in person on the afternoon of 25 December 1941 at the Peninsula Hotel, which the Japanese were using as their headquarters.

Allied prisoners of war were forced to build Japan's 'Death Railway' from Thailand into which neighbouring country?

Burma was the far end of a 415 km line on which around 12,000 Allied prisoners died. Asian civilian labourers suffered even more, with over 90,000 deaths.

Japan's Fu-Go bombs, which killed six people in Oregon in 1945, crossed the Pacific carried by what?

Paper balloons filled with hydrogen rode the jet stream from Japan, and about 9,300 were launched. The Oregon victims were the war's only deaths from enemy action in the contiguous US.

Allied airmen dug tunnels named Tom, Dick and Harry to break out of which German prison camp in March 1944?

Stalag Luft III had been sited on sandy soil precisely to make tunnelling hard. Seventy-six men got out in the 'Great Escape', but 73 of them were captured.

Which German battleship, sister of Bismarck, capsized near Tromsø in 1944 after RAF 'Tallboy' bombs struck it?

Tirpitz was so rarely sent to sea that she was known as the 'Lonely Queen of the North'. Two direct hits from 12,000-pound bombs dropped by Lancasters rolled her over.

Which Japanese battleship, with the largest guns ever mounted on a warship, did US carrier planes sink in April 1945?

Yamato was on a one-way mission, with orders to beach herself as an unsinkable gun emplacement and fight until destroyed. Most of her crew went down with her.

In which French city did General Alfred Jodl sign Germany's first unconditional surrender, in a red brick schoolhouse?

Reims was not the end of it: the Soviet High Command rejected the document within hours, so a second surrender was signed in Berlin the next day.

Italian partisans captured the fleeing Benito Mussolini in April 1945 near Dongo, a village on which lake?

Lake Como lay on his escape route towards the Swiss border. He was shot the next afternoon, and his body was put on show in a Milan square, the Piazzale Loreto.

Which German commander surrendered his encircled Sixth Army a day after learning of his promotion to field marshal?

Friedrich Paulus was expected by Hitler to take his own life, since there was no precedent for a German field marshal being captured alive. He surrendered instead.

British Swordfish biplanes from HMS Illustrious crippled Italy's battle fleet in November 1940 at which naval base?

Taranto was the first all-aircraft ship-to-ship naval attack in history, flown at night by just 21 torpedo-bombers.

Which code-breaking machine designed by Tommy Flowers is regarded as the first programmable electronic digital computer?

Colossus stayed secret until the mid-1970s, so for decades other machines took the credit. It used thermionic valves to attack the Lorenz cipher.

Babi Yar, the ravine where Nazi forces murdered some 33,771 Jews over two days in September 1941, lies in which city?

Kyiv had been occupied by Axis forces only ten days earlier. The city's Jews were ordered by posted notices to assemble, supposedly for resettlement.

Which US carrier, patched up at Pearl Harbor in about 48 hours, went on to be sunk at the Battle of Midway?

USS Yorktown had damage that yard inspectors thought needed at least two weeks to fix. Her dive-bombers set the carrier Sōryū ablaze before a Japanese submarine caught the crippled ship.

Which diplomat saved thousands of Budapest's Jews with protective passports in 1944, then vanished into Soviet custody?

Raoul Wallenberg also sheltered people in buildings he declared Swedish territory. Detained by Soviet agents in January 1945, he was reported in 1957 to have died in Moscow's Lubyanka prison.