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50 free 1942 trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
1942 was the year the war went global and everyday life bent around it. Britain put more of daily life on the ration, an economist's blueprint for the welfare state landed in December, and the Luftwaffe picked its targets from a tourist guide. In the Pacific and the Atlantic the fortunes of the war began to turn, and physicists in Chicago quietly started the atomic age under a football stand. These 50 questions cover the news, sport, music, film, science and everyday life of the year, with a British lean: a radio programme that has never gone off the air, a royal flying boat lost in the Highlands, a hockey comeback never matched, a film star's patent, a painted diner, a birthday present that became a diary, and the births of a Beatle, a boxer and a cosmologist. Most are pitched for a pub table, with a handful for people who really know the year. Play on your phone with instant answers and explanations, or print it for a pub quiz, a classroom or a 1942-themed birthday.
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Q 01Which physicist, born in Oxford on 8 January, arrived exactly 300 years to the day after Galileo died?
Stephen Hawking
Stephen Hawking was born into a family of physicians, and both his parents had studied at Oxford despite the family's limited means. He went up to University College, Oxford, at 17 and coxed for the Boat Club.
Q 02Which college football game left Pasadena for Durham, North Carolina on 1 January, over fears of a Japanese attack?
Rose Bowl
The Rose Bowl was played at the Blue Devils' home stadium after they invited the game and Oregon State east, and the visitors won 20–16. The hosts also released 140 tickets to Black fans after a local newspaper protested.
Q 03Which film star, with the composer George Antheil, won a US patent on 11 August for frequency-hopping torpedo guidance?
Hedy Lamarr
Hedy Lamarr filed under her legal name, Hedy Kiesler Markey, and the idea reached operational systems only in 1962, three years after the patent expired. Frequency hopping went on to underpin spread-spectrum radio.
Q 04Which actress, Clark Gable's wife, died on 16 January when her plane home from a war-bond tour hit a Nevada mountain?
Carole Lombard
Carole Lombard's TWA flight hit Potosi Mountain near Las Vegas after the beacons that guided night flights had been switched off for fear of Japanese bombers. Gable, inconsolable, joined the Army Air Forces soon afterwards.
Q 05Which BBC radio programme, devised by Roy Plomley, began on 29 January with comedian Vic Oliver as its first guest?
Desert Island Discs
Desert Island Discs cast away Vic Oliver, who happened to be Winston Churchill's son-in-law, and the format still asks each guest for eight records, a book and a luxury. It went out first on the BBC Forces Programme.
Q 06Which NHL team lost the first three games of the Stanley Cup Final to Detroit and then won the next four?
Toronto Maple Leafs
The Toronto Maple Leafs remain the only NHL team to win a Stanley Cup Final from 3–0 down, and they were the first in North American sport to overturn such a deficit in any playoff series.
Q 07Which boxer, born in Louisville on 17 January, was given a birth name honouring a slave-owner turned abolitionist?
Muhammad Ali
Muhammad Ali was born Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr.; his father had been named after the 19th-century Republican politician and abolitionist Cassius Marcellus Clay, a slave owner who changed sides. He began boxing at 12.
Q 08What did Anne Frank receive for her 13th birthday on 12 June, weeks before her family went into hiding?
An autograph book
An autograph book bound in checkered cloth, with a small lock on the front, became the diary; the family went into hiding on 6 July, ten days earlier than planned, after Margot was called up for a work camp.
Q 09Which Edward Hopper painting of a late-night diner, finished on 21 January, sold to a Chicago museum for $3,000?
Nighthawks
Nighthawks was entered in Hopper's ledger in his own hand as 'Night Hawks'; the Art Institute of Chicago bought it on 13 May for $3,000, roughly $59,000 at 2025 prices.
Q 10Whose December blueprint for social insurance named Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness as 'giants'?
William Beveridge
William Beveridge's wife-to-be, the mathematician Janet Philip, did the research and publicity for it; the Trades Union Congress backed it within a fortnight and the insurance companies attacked it before the month was out.
Q 11Which everyday item went on the ration in Britain in February, with one coupon buying a four-ounce bar?
Soap
Soap of every kind was rationed, and one coupon bought a four-ounce bar of hard soap, three ounces of toilet soap or six ounces of soap powder; bread, by contrast, was never rationed until after the war.
Q 12Which Beatle was born on 18 June at Walton Hospital in Liverpool, where his mother had qualified as a nurse?
Paul McCartney
Paul McCartney's mother rode a bicycle to her patients and died when he was 14, a loss that later bonded him with John Lennon, whose own mother died in 1958. His father Jim led a jazz band.
Q 13Which guitarist, born in Seattle on 27 November as Johnny Allen, was renamed James Marshall four years later?
Jimi Hendrix
Q 21What did Gandhi call the campaign he launched at Bombay's Gowalia Tank Maidan on 8 August with the cry 'Do or Die'?
Quit India
Quit India was launched at the Bombay session of the All India Congress Committee after the Cripps Mission had failed to win Indian support for the British war effort, and it demanded an end to British rule.
Q 22Which Latin American country declared war on Germany and Italy on 22 August after U-boats sank 18 of its merchant ships?
Brazil
Brazil's expeditionary force, sent to Italy in 1944, called itself the Smoking Snakes, because sceptics had said a snake was likelier to smoke a pipe than the force was to reach the front.
Q 23Beneath the stands of which disused University of Chicago football ground did Fermi's pile go critical on 2 December?
Jimi Hendrix's parents changed his name in 1946 in honour of his father Al and Al's late brother Leon Marshall; he was the eldest of his mother Lucille's children. Seattle made 27 November 1992 Jimi Hendrix Day.
Q 14Which future US president was born on 20 November at St Mary's Hospital in Scranton, Pennsylvania?
Joe Biden
Joe Biden's family moved in with his mother's parents in Scranton after his father's business setbacks, before settling in Delaware; he became the 46th president in 2021.
Q 15Which comedian, born on 24 November 'on the linoleum, three floors up' in Glasgow, was a shipyard welder before comedy?
Billy Connolly
Billy Connolly was a boilermaker's welder in the Glasgow yards in the early 1960s and gave it up at the end of the decade to sing folk; he was knighted in 2017 for services to entertainment and charity.
Q 16Which World Cup winner, born in Collyhurst on 18 May, jigged round Wembley in 1966 with the trophy and his false teeth?
Nobby Stiles
Nobby Stiles's jig was broadcast everywhere, and thirty years on Baddiel and Skinner's 'Three Lions' closed its list of English football memories with '...Nobby dancing'. He grew up in a working-class district of north Manchester.
Q 17Which besieged Mediterranean base received the George Cross from King George VI in a letter dated 15 April?
Malta
Malta's governor replied 'By God's help Malta will not weaken but will endure until victory is won', and the George Cross was added to Malta's flag in 1943, where it remains today. It is one of only three collective awards of the medal.
Q 18Which brother of George VI died on 25 August when his Sunderland flying boat crashed on a Caithness hillside?
The Duke of Kent
The Duke of Kent, fourth son of George V, was one of 14 killed on Eagle's Rock near Dunbeath during a non-operational flight to Iceland; the Sunderland's rear gunner, Flight Sergeant Andrew Jack, was the sole survivor.
Q 19Which French port did 5,000 Canadians attack in Operation Jubilee on 19 August, suffering 68 per cent casualties?
Dieppe
Dieppe's raid was over in under ten hours; 3,367 of the Canadians were killed, wounded or captured, and the hard lessons about assaulting a defended port shaped the D-Day landings two years later.
Q 20Which Australian city was bombed on 19 February by four of the Japanese carriers that had struck Pearl Harbor?
Darwin
Darwin took a heavier weight of bombs than Pearl Harbor had, though far fewer died, and it was the first of about 100 Japanese air raids on northern Australia; all four carriers were sunk at Midway in June.
Stagg Field
Stagg Field's west stands hid a rackets court where Chicago Pile-1 produced the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction; the coded report sent afterwards read 'The Italian navigator has landed in the new world'.
Q 24Which four-engined RAF bomber, developed from the troublesome Manchester, flew its first mission on 2 March?
Avro Lancaster
The Avro Lancaster's debut by No. 44 Squadron was laying mines in the Heligoland Bight, after a planned strike on the battleship Tirpitz was put off by bad weather; Roy Chadwick's design swapped two Vultures for four Rolls-Royce Merlins.
Q 25Which Warner Bros. bird first appeared, pink and naked, in Bob Clampett's short 'A Tale of Two Kitties'?
Tweety
Tweety's first foes, Babbit and Catstello, were based on Abbott and Costello, and the bird began as an aggressive wild nestling before softening into the yellow canary of 46 golden-age cartoons.
Q 26Which William Wyler film about an English family at war did Roosevelt order rushed into cinemas as propaganda?
Mrs. Miniver
Mrs. Miniver was the year's highest-grossing film and the first centred on the Second World War to win Best Picture, one of its six Oscars. Goebbels wrote that its propaganda had 'up to now only been dreamed of'.
Q 27Which gangster-film star won the Best Actor Oscar playing the song-and-dance man George M. Cohan in Yankee Doodle Dandy?
James Cagney
James Cagney's sister Jeanne played Cohan's sister and his brother was the associate producer; the film took three of its eight Oscar nominations and Cagney later reprised the role.
Q 28Which Enid Blyton series began with Julian, Dick, Anne and George exploring a wreck off Kirrin with Timmy the dog?
The Famous Five
The Famous Five's first adventure, published that year, had the cousins find a map of Kirrin Castle aboard the wreck of George's great-great-great-grandfather's ship. Their usual Polzeath holiday had fallen through.
Q 29Which writer first set out his Three Laws of Robotics in 'Runaround', published in Astounding Science-Fiction in March?
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov's laws had been implied in earlier stories, but all three appeared together for the first time in 'Runaround', which was later collected in I, Robot in 1950.
Q 30Which Vera Lynn song was written by two Americans, one apparently unaware that its bird does not occur in Britain?
The White Cliffs of Dover
The White Cliffs of Dover was composed in 1941 with a lyric by Nat Burton, and in America it was first recorded by the Glenn Miller Orchestra before Kay Kyser's version overtook it in the charts in January.