146 Fun Facts About WW2

Germany's invasion of which country on 1 September 1939 began World War II in Europe?

Poland was attacked at dawn after the SS staged a fake Polish raid on a German radio station at Gleiwitz as a pretext; Britain and France declared war on Germany two days later.

What was the name of Nazi Germany's secret state police?

Gestapo is short for Geheime Staatspolizei, 'secret state police'; with only about 32,000 staff by late 1944, it relied heavily on ordinary Germans denouncing one another.

What was the code name for Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941?

Operation Barbarossa was named after the medieval emperor Frederick Barbarossa; Hitler expected a quick victory, but the invasion by some three million German troops stalled outside Moscow as winter set in.

Who ran Nazi Germany's propaganda ministry from 1933 until his suicide in May 1945?

Joseph Goebbels controlled Germany's press, radio and film for twelve years; named chancellor in Hitler's will, he held the office for a single day before killing himself on 1 May 1945.

In what region of France did the D-Day landings primarily take place?

Normandy was a surprise: the Germans expected the landing at Calais, the shortest crossing, and the Allies fed that belief with a phantom army, fake equipment and bogus radio traffic.

Which German general earned the nickname 'Desert Fox' while leading the Afrika Korps?

Erwin Rommel was later linked to the July 1944 plot to kill Hitler; offered a choice between poison and a public trial, he took cyanide and was given a state funeral.

Which June 1942 naval clash is often called the turning point of the war in the Pacific?

The Battle of Midway, fought 4–7 June 1942, cost Japan four fleet carriers (Akagi, Kaga, Soryu and Hiryu) and ended its offensive momentum in the Pacific.

Who was the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe during World War II?

Dwight D. Eisenhower was named to the post in December 1943; on the eve of D-Day he drafted a note for use if the landings failed, ending 'If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt, it is mine alone.'

Which February 1945 meeting of the 'Big Three' leaders discussed the post-war reorganization of Europe?

The Yalta Conference agreed to divide defeated Germany into occupation zones and drew a secret promise that the Soviet Union would join the war against Japan within three months of Germany's surrender.

Germany's surprise December 1944 offensive in Belgium and Luxembourg is best known by what name?

The Battle of the Bulge began under thick cloud that kept Allied aircraft grounded; when the skies cleared around Christmas, air attacks hit the German columns and their supply lines.

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

Douglas MacArthur served as Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers from August 1945, directing Japan's occupation and its 1947 constitution, until Truman relieved him in April 1951 and Matthew Ridgway took over.

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

The Battle of Iwo Jima was four days old when Rosenthal caught six Marines raising a second, larger flag on 23 February 1945; the first had gone up that morning, and his picture won a Pulitzer Prize.

Under which March 1941 act did the United States ship arms to Britain months before entering the war?

The Lend-Lease Act, filed as bill H.R. 1776, let the US lend arms instead of selling them because Britain was running out of money to pay; some $50 billion in aid went to more than 30 countries.

Which camp complex, the largest the Nazis built, was liberated by Soviet troops in January 1945?

Auschwitz was liberated on 27 January 1945, a date the United Nations now marks as International Holocaust Remembrance Day; about 1.1 million people were murdered there, around a million of them Jews.

Which British Prime Minister led the country for most of World War II?

Winston Churchill took office on 10 May 1940 and led Britain through the war against Germany, only for voters to turn him out in July 1945, two months after Germany's surrender and before Japan's.

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

The Home Army rose on 1 August 1944, hoping to free Warsaw before the approaching Red Army could take control; Soviet forces stopped on the far bank of the Vistula, and after 63 days the Germans destroyed most of the city.

What was the code name for the Allied campaign in north-west Europe that opened with the D-Day landings?

Operation Overlord put more than 150,000 troops across the Channel on its first day; the assault phase had its own code name, Neptune, and bad weather forced a 24-hour delay from 5 June.

The 1943 Operation Mincemeat, a corpse planted with fake documents, disguised the invasion of which island?

Operation Mincemeat's planted letters pointed to Greece and Sardinia to mask the real target, Sicily; the corpse of Glyndwr Michael was passed off as Royal Marines Major William Martin.

Which physicist directed the Los Alamos laboratory that designed the first atomic bombs?

J. Robert Oppenheimer led Los Alamos through the war, then argued against building the far more powerful hydrogen bomb; in 1954, during the Red Scare, a security hearing stripped him of his clearance.

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

The Luftwaffe was built in secret, because the Treaty of Versailles had banned Germany from having an air force; Hitler formally established it in February 1935.

Which summer 1943 Eastern Front battle is often called the largest tank engagement in history?

The Battle of Kursk held few surprises for the defenders: warned by intelligence, the Soviets sowed the salient with around a million mines, and it proved Germany's last major offensive in the East.

Which British fighter with distinctive elliptical wings, designed by R. J. Mitchell, was built throughout the war?

The Supermarine Spitfire was the only British fighter built continuously through the war, with more than 20,000 made, but its designer never saw it in service: Mitchell died of cancer in 1937.

Which German weapon began falling on England without warning in September 1944?

The V-2 rocket flew faster than sound, so it struck before anyone heard it coming; its designer, Wernher von Braun, later built the Saturn V that carried Apollo astronauts to the Moon.

What did the Allies call the Westwall, the fortified belt along Germany's western border?

Siegfried Line was the English name for the Westwall. A British song of 1939 promised to hang out the washing on it, yet the Allies did not attack it in force until September 1944 and were still fighting through it in early 1945.

Who was President when the United States entered World War II?

Franklin Roosevelt called the attack 'a date which will live in infamy', and within the hour Congress declared war on Japan with a single dissenting vote, cast by Montana's Jeannette Rankin.

The 1940 Soviet massacre of thousands of captured Polish officers and officials is named after which forest?

Katyn Forest's mass graves were announced by the Germans in 1943; Moscow blamed the Nazis for nearly fifty years and admitted only in 1990 that the Soviet secret police had carried out the shootings.

On which date did Japanese carrier aircraft attack the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, bringing America into World War II?

December 7, 1941 was a Sunday morning in Hawaii; all eight US battleships in port were sunk or damaged, but the Pacific Fleet's aircraft carriers were away at sea and escaped untouched.

Which 1942-43 Eastern Front battle is considered a turning point of WWII, marking the start of the German retreat?

The Battle of Stalingrad ended with the German Sixth Army surrounded; Hitler promoted its commander, Friedrich Paulus, to field marshal because no German field marshal had ever surrendered, and Paulus gave himself up the next day.

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

Amsterdam was a refuge first: the Franks had fled there from Frankfurt after the Nazis took power in 1933. They hid for two years in rooms concealed behind a bookcase until their arrest on 4 August 1944.

Who was the Emperor of Japan during World War II?

Hirohito's voice had never been broadcast to his people until 15 August 1945, when a recording of him announcing the surrender went out by radio; on 1 January 1946 he publicly denied that the emperor was divine.

What does V-E Day signify?

Victory in Europe is marked on 8 May in the West but on 9 May in Russia: the surrender took effect at 23:01 Central European time, when it was already past midnight in Moscow.

What was the code name for the secret WWII project that produced the first nuclear weapons?

The Manhattan Project took its name from the Army engineers' Manhattan District, named in the usual way for the city where its first offices stood; at its peak it employed about 130,000 people.

Who led the Soviet Union during World War II?

Joseph Stalin ignored repeated warnings, from his own spies and from Britain, that Germany was about to invade in 1941; when German troops neared Moscow that autumn, he stayed in the capital.

What was the code name for the 1940 evacuation of more than 338,000 Allied troops from Dunkirk?

Operation Dynamo was named after the dynamo room in the tunnels beneath Dover Castle where it was run; planners hoped to rescue 45,000 men and brought home 338,000.

Which 1942 atrocity saw tens of thousands of American and Filipino prisoners of war driven on foot to Camp O'Donnell?

The Bataan Death March covered some 65 miles in tropical heat; guards beat and bayoneted prisoners who fell behind, and Japan's commander, Masaharu Homma, was tried and executed for it in 1946.

Which German cipher machine, used by all its armed forces, was first broken by Polish mathematicians in 1932?

Enigma was first broken in 1932 by Marian Rejewski of Poland's Cipher Bureau; five weeks before the war began, the Poles handed their methods to Britain and France.

Which country was invaded by the Red Army on 30 November 1939, starting the Winter War?

Finland fought the Winter War from 30 November 1939 until the Moscow Peace Treaty of 12 March 1940 ceded the Karelian Isthmus and Viipuri; the League of Nations expelled the Soviet Union for the attack.

What was Germany's sustained 1940–41 bombing campaign against the United Kingdom called?

The Blitz, short for Blitzkrieg, drove Londoners in their thousands to sleep in Underground stations, something the government at first tried to stop before giving way.

Which January 1942 meeting of senior Nazi officials coordinated the genocide of Europe's Jews?

The Wannsee Conference of 20 January 1942 brought 15 senior officials together under Reinhard Heydrich; its minutes speak in euphemisms, but everyone present understood that the subject was mass murder.

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

USS Missouri was named for Harry Truman's home state and christened by his daughter Margaret; the ceremony on her deck lasted just 23 minutes, and she is now a museum ship at Pearl Harbor.

Which August 1941 declaration by Britain and the United States set out their aims for the postwar world?

The Atlantic Charter was agreed aboard warships in Placentia Bay, Newfoundland, four months before the United States entered the war; in January 1942 the other Allies pledged to uphold its principles.

Which August 1939 non-aggression pact between Nazi Germany and the USSR secretly divided Eastern Europe between them?

The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, named for the two foreign ministers who signed it, was meant to keep the peace between them for ten years; Germany broke it in under two by invading the Soviet Union in June 1941.

What euphemism did the Nazis use for their plan to exterminate the Jewish population?

'Final Solution' (Endlösung der Judenfrage) was the Nazi euphemism for the genocide of Europe's Jews; Hermann Göring's letter of 31 July 1941 ordered Reinhard Heydrich to prepare it.

Japan's February 1942 capture of which British base was Britain's largest surrender in history?

Singapore had been fortified against attack from the sea, but the Japanese came overland down the Malay peninsula; the island fell on 15 February 1942 after a week of fighting.

Which American officer led 16 Army bombers off the carrier USS Hornet to bomb Tokyo in April 1942?

James Doolittle's B-25s could take off from a carrier but not land back on one, so the crews flew on towards China, where most crashed or bailed out; it was the first American air strike on Japan's home islands.

Which Soviet city withstood an 872-day siege without ever being captured?

Leningrad was kept alive by the 'Road of Life', a supply route across the ice of frozen Lake Ladoga; even so, hunger killed hundreds of thousands of its people during the 872-day siege.

Which German city on the Elbe was devastated by a firestorm after British and American bombing in February 1945?

Dresden's firestorm killed up to 25,000 people; an American prisoner of war who lived through it, Kurt Vonnegut, later wrote the novel Slaughterhouse-Five about the raid.

In which German city, once the stage for Nazi Party rallies, were leading Nazis tried for war crimes from 1945?

Nuremberg was chosen because its Palace of Justice had come through the bombing largely intact and because the city had hosted the Nazi rallies; 12 of the 22 leading defendants were sentenced to death.

Which of these European countries maintained armed neutrality throughout World War II?

Switzerland backed its neutrality with force: it mobilised its army within days in 1939, shot down German aircraft that crossed its border in 1940, and planned a last stand in an Alpine 'redoubt'.

Who led Nationalist China through its eight-year war against Japan from 1937 to 1945?

Chiang Kai-shek had been seized by his own generals in 1936 and held for two weeks until he agreed to stop fighting the Communists and face Japan; beaten in the civil war that followed, he fled to Taiwan in 1949.

The Battle of Britain in the summer of 1940 was the first major military campaign in history fought entirely by what?

Air forces decided it because Germany needed control of the skies before any invasion fleet could cross the Channel; the RAF pilots who denied it are remembered as 'the Few'.

What was the longest continuous military campaign of World War II?

The Battle of the Atlantic ran from 3 September 1939, when U-30 sank the liner Athenia, until Germany's surrender in May 1945, making it the war's longest continuous campaign.

What name was given to groups of German U-boats coordinated by radio to attack Allied convoys together?

Wolf packs (Rudel) let U-boats mass against a convoy instead of attacking singly, which is why the tactic borrowed a predator's name.

Operation Watchtower, launched by US Marines in August 1942, was the invasion of which island in the Solomons?

Guadalcanal was invaded to seize an airfield the Japanese were building, from which bombers could have threatened the sea lanes to Australia; the Marines finished it as Henderson Field and held it through six months of fighting.

Which British general opened the Eighth Army's offensive at the Second Battle of El Alamein?

Bernard Montgomery got the Eighth Army in August 1942 only because the first choice, William Gott, was killed when his plane was shot down; ten weeks later he opened the attack at El Alamein.

Operation Market Garden aimed to seize bridges up to which Dutch city on the Lower Rhine?

Arnhem's road bridge over the Lower Rhine was the last objective of Operation Market Garden in September 1944; British paratroopers seized its north end and held on for days, but the tanks sent to relieve them never got through.

What nickname did the Battle of Okinawa earn for the ferocity of its fighting and bombardment?

'Typhoon of steel' translates the Japanese tetsu no bōfū; the 82-day battle killed more than 12,000 Americans and tens of thousands of Okinawan civilians, a toll that foreshadowed the cost of invading Japan itself.

Which American flying unit of World War II was nicknamed the 'Red Tails' for its aircraft markings?

The Tuskegee Airmen were the first Black military aviators in the US armed forces; flying red-tailed fighters as bomber escorts, they earned three Distinguished Unit Citations and helped push the military towards integration.

Which Soviet marshal directed the defence of Moscow in 1941 and accepted Germany's surrender in 1945?

Georgy Zhukov came home so popular that the Kremlin treated him as a threat and soon demoted him to a provincial command in Odessa.

What electromechanical codebreaking machine did Alan Turing design at Bletchley Park in 1939?

The bombe was developed from the Polish 'bomba', an earlier codebreaking machine whose secrets Poland shared with Britain in 1939; Gordon Welchman's 'diagonal board' then made it far more efficient.

Which British wartime machine, built by engineer Tommy Flowers to break German ciphers, is regarded as the first programmable electronic computer?

Colossus went to work in early 1944 with some 1,600 valves; it stayed secret until the mid-1970s, so its builders went without public credit for three decades.

Which RAF unit carried out the 1943 Dambusters Raid with Barnes Wallis's bouncing bombs?

617 Squadron was formed in secret only eight weeks earlier for this one raid; led by Guy Gibson, its 19 Lancasters breached the Möhne and Eder dams on 16–17 May 1943, but eight aircraft and 53 airmen were lost.

The Trinity test, the first atomic bomb detonation in July 1945, lit up the Jornada del Muerto desert of which US state?

New Mexico's desert sand was fused by the fireball into a green glass later named trinitite; the test came just three weeks before the bomb was used on Hiroshima.

Which SS officer crushed the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and recorded it in an illustrated report?

Jürgen Stroop crushed the uprising between 19 April and 16 May 1943 and closed his final daily report with the boast that the Jewish quarter of Warsaw 'is no more', the title he gave his illustrated album of the operation.

Which Nazi Party member saved about 1,200 Jews by employing them in his factories?

Oskar Schindler spent his fortune on bribes to keep his workers safe; when he died in Germany in 1974 he was buried in Jerusalem, where survivors he had saved followed his coffin.

In which German city was the White Rose resistance group of Hans and Sophie Scholl based?

The White Rose was based at the University of Munich, where Hans and Sophie Scholl were caught distributing their sixth leaflet on 18 February 1943 and guillotined four days later with Christoph Probst.

Where did Claus von Stauffenberg plant his briefcase bomb on 20 July 1944?

The Wolf's Lair (Wolfsschanze) near Rastenburg in East Prussia was Hitler's Eastern Front headquarters; Stauffenberg's bomb exploded in its briefing hut, killing four men but only injuring Hitler.

Who was head of state of the collaborationist French State based at Vichy from 1940?

Philippe Pétain was a national hero for his defence of Verdun in 1916; after the liberation a French court condemned him to death for his role at Vichy, a sentence commuted to life imprisonment.

From which city did Charles de Gaulle broadcast his appeal of 18 June 1940, urging the French to fight on?

London was where de Gaulle had landed only the day before; the BBC gave him a few minutes on air, and the broadcast is now regarded as the founding act of the French Resistance.

Which deposed dictator did German glider troops snatch from a mountaintop hotel on the Gran Sasso in September 1943?

Benito Mussolini had been dismissed and arrested only seven weeks earlier; after the rescue Hitler made him the figurehead of a puppet state in German-occupied northern Italy.

The Tripartite Pact between Germany, Italy and Japan was signed in which city in 1940?

Berlin hosted the signing on 27 September 1940; the three pledged to aid one another if attacked by a power not yet in the war, a warning aimed squarely at the United States.

Through which forest region did Germany bypass the Maginot Line in 1940?

German panzers advanced through the Belgian Ardennes, which French planners had judged impassable for tanks, and crossed the Meuse at Sedan on 13 May 1940, outflanking the Maginot Line.

The 1938 Munich Agreement let Hitler's Germany annex which largely German-speaking border region?

The Sudetenland was signed away at a conference to which Czechoslovakia was not even invited; Chamberlain flew home promising 'peace for our time', and six months later Hitler took the rest of the country.

Which May 1942 battle was the first in which the opposing fleets never sighted each other, fighting only with carrier aircraft?

The Battle of the Coral Sea cost the US the carrier Lexington and counts as a tactical win for Japan, yet Japan had to call off its seaborne invasion of Port Moresby, a strategic victory for the Allies.

Which British battlecruiser was sunk by Bismarck's group at the Battle of the Denmark Strait?

HMS Hood blew up within minutes on 24 May 1941, probably when a shell reached her magazines; only three of her 1,418 crew survived, and the Royal Navy hunted Bismarck down and sank her three days later.

Which US aircraft shot down Admiral Yamamoto's plane near Bougainville in April 1943?

The Lockheed P-38 Lightning was the only fighter with the range for the mission, a round trip of about 1,000 miles; codebreakers had read Yamamoto's itinerary, and the famously punctual admiral arrived on schedule.

Whom did Hitler's will name as his successor as head of state before his suicide on 30 April 1945?

Karl Dönitz, the navy's commander, was a surprise heir: Hitler's will expelled Göring and Himmler from the party as traitors, and the admiral's government at Flensburg lasted barely three weeks.

Which US cruiser was torpedoed days after delivering atomic bomb parts to Tinian?

USS Indianapolis sank in 12 minutes, and because no one reported her overdue, survivors drifted for four days before a patrol plane spotted them; only 316 of her 1,195 crew lived.

What distinctive marking did the Flying Tigers paint on their fighter aircraft?

The Flying Tigers painted a shark face on the noses of their P-40 Warhawks, copying RAF No. 112 Squadron's markings; Claire Chennault's American Volunteer Group fought over Burma and China from December 1941.

Which 1943 conference produced the Allied demand for the Axis powers' unconditional surrender?

Casablanca's conference of 14–24 January 1943 closed with the demand made public; the Americans stressed that it meant destroying the Axis powers' philosophies of conquest, not their peoples.

Which wartime conference was the first to bring together all three of the Allied 'Big Three' leaders?

Tehran hosted the three leaders together for the first time in late 1943; there the Western Allies promised the Soviets, who had long pressed for a second front, an invasion of northern France by the spring of 1944.

Which Soviet tank was the most-produced tank of World War II?

The T-34 came as a shock to the invading Germans in 1941, its thick sloped armour shrugging off their anti-tank guns; Germany designed the Panther specifically to counter it.

Which planned German invasion of Britain did Hitler postpone indefinitely in September 1940?

Operation Sea Lion could not sail unless Germany ruled the skies over the Channel; with the RAF still undefeated, Hitler shelved the plan on 17 September 1940.

The 1941 Battle of Crete, codenamed Operation Mercury, was the first invasion mounted mainly by what kind of forces?

Crete (20 May–1 June 1941) was the first mainly airborne invasion, with German paratroopers dropped en masse; their losses were so heavy that Hitler became reluctant to authorise another large airborne assault.

The word 'kamikaze', revived in 1944 for Japan's suicide pilots, literally means what?

Divine wind first named the storm said to have wrecked Kublai Khan's Mongol invasion fleet in 1281; Japan revived the name for pilots sent to crash their aircraft into Allied ships.

The six-week massacre that began in December 1937 followed the Japanese army's capture of which Chinese capital?

Nanjing's foreign residents set up a Safety Zone that sheltered some 200,000 or more civilians during the killing; its chairman, the German businessman John Rabe, was a member of the Nazi Party.

Operation Torch, launched in November 1942, was the Allied invasion of which territory?

French North Africa was held by Vichy forces, so the Allies' first opponents there were French: Vichy troops resisted in Morocco and Algeria for about three days before a ceasefire ended the fighting.

After the 1939 Battle of the River Plate, Graf Spee was scuttled off which neutral port?

Graf Spee was scuttled off Montevideo on 17 December 1939 after Uruguay refused to let her stay beyond 72 hours; her captain, Hans Langsdorff, believed a superior British force lay in wait, and shot himself in Buenos Aires days later.

The November 1940 raid on Taranto was carried out by 21 of which biplane torpedo-bombers?

Twenty-one Fairey Swordfish from HMS Illustrious attacked Taranto on the night of 11–12 November 1940, crippling three Italian battleships; Japanese planners studied the raid before Pearl Harbor.

In May 1941 Rudolf Hess flew solo to Scotland hoping to hold peace talks with whom?

The Duke of Hamilton, a fellow aviator and the first man to fly over Everest, did not know Hess personally; Hess parachuted into Scotland on 10 May 1941, was held as a prisoner and died in Spandau Prison in 1987.

Which Czech village was destroyed in reprisal for Reinhard Heydrich's 1942 assassination?

Lidice, near Kladno, was razed on 10 June 1942 in reprisal for Operation Anthropoid; 173 men and boys were shot that day, the women were sent to Ravensbrück and most of the children were murdered, probably at Chełmno.

The 1943 Operation Gunnerside sabotaged a heavy-water plant in which occupied country?

Norway's Vemork plant was wrecked by Norwegian commandos who avoided the guarded bridge by climbing through the icy gorge below it, set their charges and escaped on skis, some as far as Sweden.

Which October 1944 clash in the Philippines was the largest naval engagement of WWII?

Leyte Gulf was Japan's last great naval gamble: it threw most of its remaining major warships at the American landings, lost four carriers and three battleships, and never again sailed in comparable force.

Lacking a word for 'submarine', Navajo code talkers used which phrase instead?

Navajo code talkers said besh-lo, 'iron fish', for submarine, one of hundreds of coined terms; some 400 Navajo Marines used the code, which the Japanese never broke.

Which Japanese battleship, the heaviest ever built, was sunk on a one-way mission to Okinawa in 1945?

Yamato was ordered to fight through to Okinawa, run aground and serve as a shore battery until destroyed; hundreds of US carrier aircraft sank her on 7 April 1945 with most of her crew.

Little Boy, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, was fuelled by which fissile material?

Little Boy's gun-type design fired one piece of uranium-235 into another; it was so inefficient that under 2 per cent of the uranium actually fissioned, yet that released about 15 kilotons.

Which soft drink did Coca-Cola's German branch invent during the war, when an embargo cut off its cola syrup?

Fanta was first mixed from what its creator called the "leftovers of leftovers", including whey and apple pomace. The name came from Fantasie, the German word for imagination.

Which kind of animal was Wojtek, an enlisted private who carried artillery shells in the 1944 Italian campaign?

Bear though he was, Wojtek was officially drafted as a private because the troopship to Italy forbade mascots and pets. He was later promoted to corporal and retired to Edinburgh Zoo.

Japanese officer Hiroo Onoda refused to believe the war had ended and fought on until 1974 in which country's jungle?

Philippines hideout Lubang Island sheltered Onoda for nearly 29 years after the fighting stopped. He gave up only when his former commanding officer flew out to relieve him of duty in person.

Which British poster slogan, printed in 1939 but rarely displayed, became famous when a bookshop found a copy in 2000?

Keep Calm and Carry On was kept in storage for use after serious air raids, and the stocks were pulped in 1940. A surviving copy turned up in a box of books at Barter Books in Alnwick.

Which household repair staple did a Johnson & Johnson division develop to seal wartime ammunition boxes against water?

Duct tape owes its wide adoption to ordnance worker Vesta Stoudt, who feared that poor box seals could cost soldiers precious time in battle. She wrote to the president with her idea.

British propaganda credited which vegetable with giving RAF pilots night vision, to hide their real advantage, radar?

Carrots were so widely believed to sharpen eyesight in the dark that Britain had a 100,000-ton surplus of them by 1942. The story explained away the success of radar-equipped night fighters.

The Dickin Medal, known as the animals' Victoria Cross, was awarded from 1943 to 1949 most often to which creatures?

Pigeons won 32 of the 54 medals, ahead of 18 dogs, three horses and a ship's cat. The first three went to RAF birds whose messages helped rescuers reach aircrews ditched at sea.

Which staple food was never rationed in Britain during the Second World War but went on the ration in 1946?

Bread stayed off the ration until July 1946, a year after the fighting ended, and then remained on it for two years. In wartime the wholemeal National Loaf replaced the white variety.

Which future children's author fractured his skull crash-landing an RAF Gladiator fighter in the desert in 1940?

Roald Dahl was blind for six weeks after the crash and wrote about it in his first published work. He had been sent to the front with no training in aerial combat.

Tom, Dick and Harry were the names that prisoners of war at Stalag Luft III gave to three of what?

Tunnels Tom, Dick and Harry were dug for a mass breakout, and 76 men crawled out through Harry before a guard spotted the 77th. The story became the film The Great Escape.

Which D-Day beach was assaulted by the US 1st and 29th Infantry Divisions against unexpectedly strong German defences?

Omaha proved so hard to clear that only 100 of the 2,400 tons of supplies planned for D-Day got ashore. Even so, 34,000 troops had landed there by the end of the day.

Troops of which Commonwealth country formed the assault force that landed on Juno Beach on D-Day?

Canada's 3rd Infantry Division pushed farther inland than any other landing force on D-Day. Its objectives for the day included Carpiquet airfield and the Caen–Bayeux railway line.

What was the code name of the plutonium bomb dropped on Japan three days after Little Boy in August 1945?

Fat Man was round and wide, and took its name from Sydney Greenstreet's character in The Maltese Falcon. It was released from the B-29 Bockscar.

J. Robert Oppenheimer said the first atomic explosion in 1945 brought to mind a line from which Hindu scripture?

Bhagavad Gita verse "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds" was the line he recalled. He had read the text in the original Sanskrit and said it helped shape his philosophy of life.

The UN's 27 January memorial day for victims of Nazi genocide marks the Red Army's 1945 liberation of which camp?

Auschwitz had been largely emptied days earlier, when the SS sent most of its prisoners west on a death march. The anniversary has been marked internationally since 2005.

Whom did Adolf Hitler marry in a brief civil ceremony in his bunker less than 40 hours before both died?

Eva Braun met him at 17 while working as an assistant to his personal photographer. She did not attend public events with him until the middle of 1944.

Which vice president, uninformed about the atomic bomb, became US president in April 1945 after just 82 days in the job?

Harry Truman told reporters he felt as though the moon, the stars and all the planets had fallen on him. He was told about the bomb only after he had been sworn in.

Which future US president commanded PT-109, a torpedo boat rammed and sunk by a Japanese destroyer in 1943?

John F. Kennedy towed an injured crewman through the water by clenching the man's life-jacket strap between his teeth. He later scratched a rescue message on a coconut.

Which singer of the wartime favourite 'We'll Meet Again' became known in Britain as the Forces' Sweetheart?

Vera Lynn earned the title after British servicemen named her their favourite performer in a Daily Express poll. She went on to give outdoor concerts for troops in Egypt and India.

By which nickname did British listeners know William Joyce, whose broadcasts opened 'Germany calling, Germany calling'?

Lord Haw-Haw began as a newspaper radio critic's jibe at the affected upper-class accent of the broadcasts. The voice he heard was probably another announcer's, but the name stuck to Joyce.

What nickname is given to the eight quiet months on the Western Front that ended with Germany's attack in May 1940?

Phoney War was only one of its names: the British first called it the Bore War, and their press coined Sitzkrieg, the "sitting war". There were virtually no major land operations.

Which corrugated-steel shelter, half-buried in British gardens, was named after the minister for air-raid precautions?

Anderson shelters were designed in 1938 to hold up to six people, sunk four feet into the ground with at least 15 inches of soil on the roof. Poorer households were issued them free.

Which British citizen militia, first called the Local Defence Volunteers, inspired the BBC sitcom Dad's Army?

Home Guard volunteers numbered more than 1.5 million, men too young, too old or otherwise ineligible for regular service. Two of the sitcom's actors had served in it during the war.

Which self-governing British Crown territory spent almost five years under German occupation, from 1940 to May 1945?

Channel Islands residents were freed only on 9 May 1945, after the German surrender. Theirs was the only part of the British Empire in Europe to be occupied during the conflict.

Which Mediterranean island was collectively awarded the George Cross in 1942 after enduring intensive Axis bombing?

Malta added the George Cross to its flag in 1943 and kept it there after independence in 1964. The award came in a letter from the King to the island's governor.

Which English city's cathedral was left a ruin by the German air raid of 14 November 1940, code-named Moonlight Sonata?

Coventry gave the German language a new verb, koventrieren, meaning to reduce a town to rubble. A new cathedral designed by Basil Spence was built alongside the ruin after the war.

Which German city was hit by four RAF and American raids in February 1945, a firestorm Kurt Vonnegut survived as a POW?

Dresden lost more than 1,600 acres of its inner city to the firestorm. Vonnegut drew on what he saw there for his 1969 novel Slaughterhouse-Five.

Which RAF fighter, overshadowed by the Spitfire, inflicted 60 percent of German losses in the Battle of Britain?

Hurricane squadrons could make many major repairs themselves, thanks to its conventional construction. The design began as a monoplane derivative of the Hawker Fury biplane.

Which British Army regiment, founded by David Stirling in 1941, has the motto 'Who Dares Wins'?

Special Air Service was a deliberately misleading name, part of a ruse to make the Axis believe a large paratrooper force was operating nearby. Its first mission was a parachute drop.

Britain's 'Bevin Boys' were conscripts chosen by lot from 1943 to work where, instead of serving in the armed forces?

Coal mines took nearly 48,000 of them, drawn as one in ten of all male conscripts aged 18 to 25. The last were not released from service until March 1948.

The Japanese 'Death Railway', built by prisoners of war and forced labourers, ran from Thailand into which country?

Burma was reached at the cost of more than 90,000 civilian labourers and around 12,000 prisoners of war, who died building the line. It ran from Ban Pong to Thanbyuzayat.

Which northern Australian town was bombed in two raids on 19 February 1942, the first by 188 Japanese carrier aircraft?

Darwin's ordeal remains the largest single attack ever mounted by a foreign power on Australia. Japan wanted to stop its harbour and airfields being used to contest the invasion of Timor and Java.

Which British colony surrendered to Japan on Christmas Day 1941, a date remembered there as 'Black Christmas'?

Hong Kong's governor surrendered in person at the Japanese headquarters on the third floor of the Peninsula Hotel. The occupation that followed lasted until the summer of 1945.

In autumn 1943, boats ferried about 7,500 Jews to neutral Sweden from which German-occupied country?

Denmark was warned by a German diplomat, Georg Duckwitz, who leaked the plan to arrest and deport the country's Jews. In the end 99 percent of them survived.

Which neutral European country spent the Second World War under a state of emergency known as 'the Emergency'?

Ireland proclaimed it as the conflict began, and although the emergency powers lapsed in 1946, the Emergency itself was not formally ended until 1976.

Which American big-band leader went missing in December 1944 when his flight from England to France never arrived?

Glenn Miller was on his way to Paris, where his orchestra was to broadcast and play for troops on leave. The evidence suggests his plane went down by accident over the sea.

Which American general was named commander of a fictitious army group to make Germany expect the invasion at Calais?

George Patton was picked because so prominent a general was sure to attract German attention. His army group existed only on paper, as part of a deception called Operation Quicksilver.

Nicholas Winton organised the trains that carried 669 children to safety in Britain from which city in 1939?

Prague was where Winton spent three weeks setting up the rescue. His part in it went unnoticed for nearly 50 years, until a BBC programme reunited him with dozens of those he had saved.

Which city lost the 1944 Summer Olympics to the Second World War but hosted the next Summer Games four years later?

London had won the 1944 Games in a 1939 vote, beating Rome, Detroit and five other cities. Prisoners of war held by Germany staged unofficial celebrations of their own that summer.

Mostly Australian defenders of which besieged Libyan port in 1941 became known as its 'Rats'?

Tobruk's garrison took a German propaganda sneer, that they lived like rats in dug-outs, and wore it as a badge of pride. Some even struck an unofficial medal bearing a rat.

Double agent Juan Pujol García, decorated by both Britain and Germany, had which code name in British intelligence?

Garbo was a nod to Greta Garbo, because his handlers thought him the best actor in the world. Germany ended up funding his network of 27 agents, every one of them invented.

Which German 6th Army commander surrendered in January 1943, a day after learning of his promotion to field marshal?

Friedrich Paulus was expected to take his own life, since no German field marshal had ever been captured alive. In Soviet captivity he became a vocal critic of the Nazi regime.

The 'Road of Life', an ice route that kept a besieged Soviet city supplied for two winters, crossed which frozen lake?

Lake Ladoga carried the only winter surface routes into the city. Between late January and mid-April 1942, more than half a million civilians were evacuated across the ice.

Which Soviet marshal, victor over Japan at Khalkhin Gol in 1939, was chosen to accept Germany's surrender in 1945?

Georgy Zhukov, born to a poor peasant family and first conscripted into the Tsar's army, was also picked to inspect the Moscow parade that celebrated it.

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

Mulberry A was battered by a three-day storm before its pontoons were securely anchored, and had to be abandoned. The system of floating roadways and sinkable breakwaters was untried.

At which besieged crossroads town did a US general answer a German surrender demand in December 1944 with 'Nuts!'?

Bastogne's one-word reply had to be explained to the German truce party as "Go to hell!". The town mattered because seven main roads through the wooded highlands converged on it.

Which neutral country did Britain occupy in May 1940, in Operation Fork, to stop Germany establishing bases there?

Iceland had declared neutrality and turned down British requests to cooperate, so the landing at Reykjavík came unannounced. It met no resistance.

Which camp in California's Owens Valley, now a National Historic Site, held over 10,000 interned Japanese Americans?

Manzanar takes its name from the Spanish for apple orchard. Its last few hundred inmates left only in November 1945, three months after the war had ended.

Which Swedish envoy issued protective passports to Jews in Budapest in 1944, then vanished into Soviet custody?

Raoul Wallenberg also sheltered Jews in buildings that he declared to be Swedish territory. Soviet counter-intelligence seized him on suspicion of espionage in January 1945.

What was the codename for the ring of coastal radar stations that gave the RAF early warning of approaching aircraft?

Chain Home was the first early warning radar network in the world. Its first five stations, covering the approaches to the capital, were working full-time by 1938.