1940s Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
This 1940s trivia quiz has 155 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 155 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor took place on which date?
December 7, 1941
Japan struck Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941; Roosevelt called it 'a date which will live in infamy' in his address to Congress the next day, and the US declared war on Japan within hours.
Q 02The D-Day landings in Normandy took place on which date in 1944?
6 June
The Allies landed in Normandy on 6 June 1944; the assault phase, codenamed Operation Neptune within Operation Overlord, put roughly 156,000 troops ashore on five beaches that day.
Q 03Victory in Europe Day, marking Germany's unconditional surrender, is celebrated on which date?
8 May 1945
Germany's surrender took effect on 8 May 1945, marked as VE Day; the definitive document was signed at Karlshorst, Berlin, late that evening, after midnight Moscow time, so Russia marks 9 May.
Q 04The first nuclear device ever detonated, the Trinity test, took place in July 1945 in which state?
New Mexico
Trinity was fired on 16 July 1945 in the Jornada del Muerto desert of New Mexico, on the Alamogordo Bombing Range; the implosion-type plutonium device was designed at Los Alamos under Robert Oppenheimer.
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 Chicago Daily Tribune, a Republican-leaning paper that had once called Truman a 'nincompoop', ran the headline in its early edition; Truman gleefully held up a copy at St. Louis Union Station.
Q 09Historians often date the Cold War's start to Truman's March 1947 speech pledging aid to which two countries?
Greece and Turkey
On 12 March 1947 Truman asked Congress for $400 million in aid to Greece and Turkey, arguing that without help both could fall into the Soviet orbit.
Q 10How many individual defendants did the 1945-46 Nuremberg trials of major Nazi leaders try?
22
Twenty-four men were indicted but 22 were tried: Robert Ley killed himself before the trial and Gustav Krupp was ruled unfit, while Martin Bormann was tried in absentia. Twelve were sentenced to death.
Q 11The State of Israel was proclaimed at the Tel Aviv Museum on which date?
14 May 1948
David Ben-Gurion read the declaration on 14 May 1948, hours before the British Mandate expired at midnight; armies of neighbouring Arab states invaded the next day.
Q 12The Zoot Suit Riots of June 1943 between servicemen and young Mexican Americans took place in which city?
Los Angeles
The riots broke out in Los Angeles in early June 1943, with servicemen attacking young Mexican Americans in zoot suits that critics called a waste of rationed wool; Detroit and Beaumont saw race riots the same month.
Q 13Most US wartime rationing ended in August 1945, but rationing of which item lingered into 1946?
Sugar
Q 21ENIAC, the first programmable electronic general-purpose computer, was dedicated in February 1946 at which university?
University of Pennsylvania
The University of Pennsylvania's machine cost $487,000 and was dubbed a 'Giant Brain' by the press; it had already been put to practical work in December 1945.
Q 22The first working transistor was built in 1947 at which research laboratory?
Bell Labs
John Bardeen and Walter Brattain demonstrated the point-contact transistor at Bell Labs in December 1947; they shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics with William Shockley.
Q 23Percy Spencer's Raytheon 'Radarange', the first commercial microwave oven, went on sale in which year?
1947
Sugar was the last rationed US staple, remaining on ration until June 1947; gasoline and canned goods were freed within days of Japan's surrender, and meat and shoes by the end of 1945.
Q 14The Pentagon was dedicated in January of which year, only 16 months after ground was broken?
1943
The Pentagon was dedicated on 15 January 1943; ground had been broken on 11 September 1941, and the building was occupied in stages while work continued on its five rings.
Q 15Sculptor 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 16Jackie Robinson broke Major League Baseball's colour line at first base for which team on April 15, 1947?
Brooklyn Dodgers
The Brooklyn Dodgers' general manager Branch Rickey had scouted him from the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro leagues.
Q 17The first post-war Summer Olympics, the 'Austerity Games' of 1948, were held in which city?
London
London stepped in at short notice and built no new venues, housing athletes in RAF camps and colleges; 59 nations took part, with Germany and Japan not invited and the Soviet Union absent.
Q 18Which aircraft was Chuck Yeager flying when he broke the sound barrier on October 14, 1947?
Bell X-1
Yeager's rocket-powered Bell X-1, which he named Glamorous Glennis after his wife, was dropped from a B-29 over the Mojave Desert and passed Mach 1 in level flight at about 43,000 feet.
Q 19Thor Heyerdahl's 1947 Kon-Tiki expedition crossed the Pacific on a raft built mainly from what?
Balsa logs
Kon-Tiki was lashed together from nine balsa logs cut in Ecuador and built at Callao, Peru, copying rafts described by the conquistadors, to test whether South Americans could have reached Polynesia.
Q 20The debris found near Roswell in 1947 came from a balloon train belonging to which secret programme?
Project Mogul
Project Mogul flew trains of balloons carrying microphones to listen for the sound of Soviet nuclear tests; the army's 'weather balloon' cover story fed decades of UFO theories.
Spencer, a self-taught engineer from Maine, had discovered the heating effect by accident in 1945 while working with radar magnetrons.
Q 24Edwin 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 25At which Philadelphia department store was the Slinky first demonstrated in November 1945?
Gimbels
Naval engineer Richard James demonstrated the Slinky on an inclined plane at Gimbels in November 1945 and sold all 400 units in about 90 minutes; the toy came from a torsion spring he saw fall off a shelf.
Q 26Earl 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 27Louis 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 28General Mills launched Cheerios in 1941 under what original name?
Cheerioats
The cereal debuted as Cheerioats in 1941 and became Cheerios in 1945 after Quaker Oats objected to the use of 'oats' in the name.
Q 29Swiss 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.
Q 30Candy Land was designed in 1948 by schoolteacher Eleanor Abbott while she recovered from which illness?
Polio
Polio put Abbott in a San Diego hospital, where she created the game for children on the ward; Milton Bradley published it in 1949 as a stopgap beside its school-supplies line.