This 1940s trivia quiz has 160 free questions with answers and covers the whole decade, not just the war. Yes, Pearl Harbor, D-Day and VE Day are here, but so are the Slinky demonstration at Gimbels, the first Tupperware, the bikini named after an atomic test, the transistor, the microwave oven, Jackie Robinson's debut and the newspaper that declared Dewey the winner. Expect questions on the films (Casablanca, Citizen Kane, It's a Wonderful Life), the music (Sinatra, Glenn Miller, the Andrews Sisters, bebop), the books (Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Anne Frank's diary), the toys and games (Candy Land, Cluedo, Silly Putty) and the post-war world of the Marshall Plan, NATO and the baby boom. Difficulty runs from easy to genuinely hard, so it works for a family night or a seniors' group as well as a pub quiz. Every answer was checked against a reference page and each question carries the sentence that supports it.
30 of 160 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor took place on which date?
December 7, 1941
Roosevelt called it 'a date which will live in infamy'. Glenn Miller's 'Chattanooga Choo Choo' was the number-one song in America that day.
Q 02The D-Day landings in Normandy took place on which date in 1944?
6 June
Codenamed Operation Neptune within Operation Overlord, it remains the largest seaborne invasion in history.
Q 03Victory in Europe Day, marking Germany's unconditional surrender, is celebrated on which date?
8 May 1945
The definitive surrender document was signed in Karlshorst, Berlin, at 22:43 that night. Japan's surrender came in September.
Q 04The first nuclear device ever detonated, the Trinity test, took place in July 1945 in which state?
New Mexico
It was an implosion-type bomb fired at White Sands Proving Ground. Robert Oppenheimer directed the Los Alamos lab that designed it.
Q 05The United Nations officially came into existence on 24 October of which year?
1945
The charter had been drafted at a San Francisco conference that spring; the first General Assembly met in London in January 1946 with 51 nations.
Q 06The Marshall Plan, officially the European Recovery Program, began operating in April of which year?
1948
It replaced the harsher Morgenthau Plan and ran for four years before the Mutual Security Act largely superseded it in 1951.
Q 07The Berlin Airlift, which supplied West Berlin during the Soviet blockade, began in June of which year?
1948
The blockade ran from 24 June 1948 to 12 May 1949; the airlift itself continued until September 1949.
Q 08Which newspaper printed the famous wrong headline 'Dewey Defeats Truman' in November 1948?
Chicago Daily Tribune
The Republican-leaning paper had once called Truman a 'nincompoop'. Truman gleefully posed with a copy the next day.
Q 09The North Atlantic Treaty founding NATO was signed on 4 April of which year?
1949
There were twelve founding members, including the US, Canada, Portugal, Italy, Norway, Denmark and Iceland alongside the Western Union states.
Q 10Historians often date the Cold War's start to Truman's March 1947 speech pledging aid to which two countries?
Greece and Turkey
The Truman Doctrine argued that without help both would slide into the communist bloc.
Q 11How many individual defendants did the 1945-46 Nuremberg trials of major Nazi leaders try?
22
The International Military Tribunal also indicted six German organisations. Twelve of the men were sentenced to death.
Q 12The State of Israel was proclaimed at the Tel Aviv Museum on which date?
14 May 1948
David Ben-Gurion read the declaration; war with neighbouring Arab states began the next day.
Q 13The Zoot Suit Riots of June 1943 between servicemen and young Mexican Americans took place in which city?
Los Angeles
The suits were criticised as a wasteful use of rationed wool. Detroit, Mobile and Beaumont also saw race riots that summer.
Q 21The debris found near Roswell in 1947 came from a balloon train belonging to which secret programme?
Project Mogul
The balloons were meant to detect Soviet nuclear tests. The army's cover story about a weather balloon fed decades of UFO theories.
Q 22Where was ENIAC, the first programmable electronic general-purpose computer, dedicated in February 1946?
University of Pennsylvania
It cost $487,000 and the press dubbed it a 'Giant Brain'. It had already been put to practical work in December 1945.
Q 23The first working transistor was built in 1947 at which research laboratory?
Bell Labs
Q 14Most US wartime rationing ended in August 1945, but rationing of which item lingered into 1946?
Sugar
It had been distributed evenly per household member. In Britain, by contrast, sweet rationing lasted until 1953.
Q 15The Pentagon was dedicated in January of which year, only 16 months after ground was broken?
1943
Ground was broken on the morning of 11 September, two years earlier. It is the world's second-largest office building with about 6.5 million square feet of floor space.
Q 16Sculptor Gutzon Borglum's work on Mount Rushmore, begun in 1927, was completed in which year?
1941
His son Lincoln finished the job after Gutzon died that March. Borglum called it the Shrine of Democracy.
Q 17Jackie Robinson broke Major League Baseball's colour line at first base for which team on April 15, 1947?
Brooklyn Dodgers
General manager Branch Rickey had scouted him from the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro leagues.
Q 18The first post-war Summer Olympics, the 'Austerity Games' of 1948, were held in which city?
London
The 1940 Games had been scheduled for Tokyo and then Helsinki, and the 1944 Games provisionally for London, before the war cancelled both.
Q 19Which aircraft was Chuck Yeager flying when he broke the sound barrier on October 14, 1947?
Bell X-1
He hit Mach 1.05 at 45,000 feet in a plane he named Glamorous Glennis after his wife.
Q 20Thor Heyerdahl's 1947 Kon-Tiki expedition crossed the Pacific on a raft built mainly from what?
Balsa logs
The raft was built in Peru in an indigenous style copied from conquistador illustrations, to test whether South Americans could have settled Polynesia.
John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for it.
Q 24Percy Spencer's Raytheon 'Radarange', the first commercial microwave oven, went on sale in which year?
1947
Spencer, a self-taught engineer from Maine, had discovered the heating effect by accident in 1945 while working with radar magnetrons.
Q 25Edwin Land's company created the first instant camera, the Land Camera, in which year?
1948
The company was Polaroid, originally founded to exploit Land's polarising polymer.
Q 26At which Philadelphia department store was the Slinky first demonstrated in November 1945?
Gimbels
Naval engineer Richard James set up an inclined plane in the toy section on the Tuesday after Thanksgiving and sold out in minutes.
Q 27Earl Tupper, a former DuPont chemist, created the first Tupperware product in which year?
1946
He made it in Leominster, Massachusetts. The home party sales model that made it famous came later, in the 1950s.
Q 28Louis Réard's 1946 swimsuit was named the bikini after an atoll where what had just happened?
A public nuclear bomb test
Rival designer Jacques Heim had launched the 'Atome' two months earlier, billed as the smallest swimsuit in the world.
Q 29General Mills launched Cheerios in 1941 under what original name?
Cheerioats
The name changed in 1945 after Quaker Oats complained about the use of the word 'oats'.
Q 30Swiss engineer George de Mestral conceived the hook-and-loop fastener he named Velcro in which year?
1941
The idea came from burrs sticking to his dog; his breakthrough was thinking of hook-and-eye closures at a tiny scale. Weavers in Lyon initially rejected it.