1918
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50 free 1918 trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The year 1918 changed the map of the world. It opened with armies still dug in across Europe and closed with emperors gone, borders redrawn and millions mourning the victims of both a war and a pandemic. Few twelve-month stretches have left so many stories behind. This quiz covers the whole year: the battles, treaties and uprisings of the war's final months, the outbreak that swept the globe, the heroes on two legs and four, and the stranger headlines, from vanished ships to freak weather and famous mistakes. There is also room for the films, songs, sport and science of the day, and for the well-known names who were born or died that year. It suits history fans, anyone tracing a family story back to 1918, and hosts planning a themed quiz night or classroom review. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so the questions work on screen or read aloud.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which neutral country's uncensored newspapers led the deadly flu pandemic of 1918 to be named after it?
Spain
Spain was not where the outbreak began: the earliest probable cases were recorded in Kansas. Warring nations censored the bad news, while Spanish papers reported it freely.
Q 02Which wartime measure did Americans first observe in March 1918, only for Congress to repeal it the following year?
Daylight saving time
Daylight saving time began on 31 March 1918 under the Standard Time Act, which also wrote the country's time zones into federal law. Congress scrapped it in 1919 over President Wilson's veto.
Q 03By what nickname was Manfred von Richthofen, the German ace shot down over France in April 1918, better known?
The Red Baron
The Red Baron was credited with 80 victories, more than any other pilot of the war. The Australian airmen who recovered his body gave him a full military funeral.
Q 04Which baseball team won the 1918 World Series and then waited 86 years for its next championship?
Boston Red Sox
The Boston Red Sox beat the Chicago Cubs four games to two. A wartime order cut the season short, making it the only World Series played entirely in September.
Q 05Which deposed monarch was shot with his wife and five children in a Yekaterinburg cellar in July 1918?
Nicholas II
Nicholas II had given up the Russian throne more than a year earlier, ending three centuries of Romanov rule. The family was held in the Ipatiev House, which its captors called the House of Special Purpose.
Q 06Which future Nobel Peace Prize winner was born in the South African village of Mvezo in July 1918?
Nelson Mandela
Nelson Mandela was given the forename Rolihlahla, a Xhosa word that loosely means troublemaker. He later became widely known by his clan name, Madiba.
Q 07Which printing error made a 24-cent American stamp issued in May 1918 famous among collectors?
An upside-down airplane
An upside-down airplane appeared on a sheet of 100 stamps that collector William Robey bought over a post office counter. He sold the sheet to a dealer for $15,000 about a week later.
Q 08In what setting in the Forest of Compiègne did Allied and German delegates sign the armistice of November 1918?
A railway carriage
A railway carriage from Marshal Foch's personal train hosted the signing. In 1940 Hitler had the same carriage hauled back to the exact spot for France's surrender.
Q 09The US Navy ship Cyclops, which vanished without a trace in March 1918, is a staple of which seafaring legend?
The Bermuda Triangle
The Bermuda Triangle legend adopted the Cyclops, a coal carrier that left Barbados for Baltimore with 306 people and a load of manganese ore. No wreckage has ever been found.
Q 10Which liner, famous for rescuing Titanic survivors in 1912, was sunk by a German submarine off Ireland in July 1918?
RMS Carpathia
RMS Carpathia took three torpedoes from U-55 two days after leaving Liverpool in a convoy. Five of the crew were killed.
Q 11Which prehistoric monument did Cecil Chubb give to the British nation in 1918, three years after buying it at auction?
Stonehenge
Stonehenge had cost Chubb £6,600 at a 1915 sale, where he reportedly bid on a whim. His deed of gift said visitors should never be charged more than one shilling.
Q 12Which doll with red yarn hair was introduced to the public in a 1918 storybook by Johnny Gruelle?
Raggedy Ann
Raggedy Ann got her name from two James Whitcomb Riley poems, The Raggedy Man and Little Orphant Annie. Gruelle had patented the doll three years before the stories appeared.
Q 13Which honorary rank is the stray dog Stubby said to have earned for catching a German spy in the Argonne in 1918?
Sergeant
Q 21What name is given to the peace program President Woodrow Wilson laid before Congress in January 1918?
The Fourteen Points
The Fourteen Points called for free trade, self-determination for national minorities and a League of Nations. The leaders of Britain, France and Italy were skeptical of such idealism.
Q 22Which treaty, signed in March 1918, took Bolshevik Russia out of the First World War at a huge cost in territory?
Brest-Litovsk
Brest-Litovsk cost Russia land holding about nine tenths of its coal mines. It was annulled eight months later, when Germany itself gave up the fight.
Q 23Which British service was born on 1 April 1918 when the flying arms of the army and the navy were merged?
Royal Air Force
Sergeant Stubby also learned to warn his regiment of mustard gas attacks after being injured by gas himself. After the war he became the mascot of the Georgetown Hoyas.
Q 14Which future Hollywood dog star was rescued as a newborn puppy from a shelled kennel on a French battlefield in 1918?
Rin Tin Tin
Rin Tin Tin was found by American serviceman Lee Duncan in a ruined German army kennel. His films earned Warner Bros. so much that studio insiders called him the mortgage lifter.
Q 15To which neutral country did Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm II flee into exile by train in November 1918?
Netherlands
The Netherlands later refused to extradite him for trial, and he lived there until his death in 1941. He bought a country house at Doorn and spent much of his time chopping wood.
Q 16Which future novelist was wounded by mortar fire in July 1918 while serving with the Red Cross on the Italian Front?
Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway had just carried chocolate and cigarettes to front-line troops when the shell landed. While recovering he fell for a Red Cross nurse, and the war later fed his novel A Farewell to Arms.
Q 17Which long-running cartoon feature of oddities first ran in December 1918 under the title Champs and Chumps?
Believe It or Not
Believe It or Not began as Robert Ripley's roundup of odd sporting feats. He took the famous title in October 1919, once he had started adding curiosities that had nothing to do with sport.
Q 18What eerie coincidence linked the tornadoes that struck Codell, Kansas, in 1916, 1917 and 1918?
The same calendar date
The same calendar date, May 20, brought a tornado to Codell three years running. The third, in 1918, was a direct hit just after dark from which the town never fully recovered.
Q 19Incas, who died at the Cincinnati Zoo in February 1918, was the last known member of which American bird species?
Carolina parakeet
The Carolina parakeet saw its last captive bird die in the same cage where Martha, the last passenger pigeon, had died in 1914. The species was declared extinct in 1939.
Q 20Which trapped American unit is the pigeon Cher Ami credited with helping to save in the Argonne in October 1918?
The Lost Battalion
The Lost Battalion was being shelled by its own artillery until, as the story goes, the wounded bird got through with a plea to stop. Of more than 500 men who went in, only 194 walked out unhurt.
The Royal Air Force was made from the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Naval Air Service. The war it was built to fight had only seven months left to run.
Q 24Which new weapon of the First World War fought its own kind for the first time near Villers-Bretonneux in April 1918?
The tank
The tank met its own kind when three German A7Vs chanced upon three British Mark IVs during an infantry attack. The only surviving A7V, Mephisto, was abandoned in the same battle.
Q 25Which city did a German super-gun begin shelling from more than 70 miles away in March 1918?
Paris
Paris was hit by shells that climbed about 26 miles high on the way, the greatest height any human-made object reached until the V-2 rocket. The first blast, at 7:18 one morning, was heard across the city.
Q 26Which branch of the American armed forces won lasting fame at the Battle of Belleau Wood in France in June 1918?
Marine Corps
The Marine Corps traces its Devil Dogs nickname to the battle. Afterwards the French renamed the wood in the Marines' honor.
Q 27Which Tennessee-born soldier won the Medal of Honor for leading an attack on a German machine-gun nest in October 1918?
Alvin York
Alvin York had first sought exemption as a conscientious objector because his church forbade violence. He was credited with taking 132 prisoners that day.
Q 28Which British war poet was killed crossing a French canal exactly one week before the armistice of November 1918?
Wilfred Owen
Wilfred Owen's mother received the telegram announcing his death on Armistice Day, as Shrewsbury's church bells rang in celebration. He was 25.
Q 29Which Bolshevik leader was badly wounded when Fanny Kaplan shot him outside a Moscow factory in August 1918?
Vladimir Lenin
Vladimir Lenin was hit by two of her three bullets after giving a speech at an arms works. Within a week his government had formally decreed the Red Terror.
Q 30Which North Atlantic island became a sovereign kingdom in December 1918 while still sharing a monarch with Denmark?
Iceland
Iceland let the Danes go on handling its foreign affairs and defense under the Act of Union. It cut the last tie in 1944, when a referendum made it a republic.