1942 Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
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.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which physicist, born in Oxford on 8 January, arrived exactly 300 years to the day after Galileo died?
Stephen Hawking
Stephen Hawking returned to Oxford as a student at 17, where he coxed a college rowing crew with such a daredevil streak, his coach recalled, that boats came back damaged.
Q 02Which college football bowl game was played in Durham, North Carolina on 1 January, moved over fears of a Japanese attack?
Rose Bowl
The Rose Bowl came to Duke's own stadium, enlarged with seating borrowed from two neighbouring colleges, after the Blue Devils offered to host; the unbeaten favourites then lost 20–16 to Oregon State.
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 and Antheil, a composer who had written for player pianos, used a piano-roll mechanism to hop among 88 frequencies; similar technology reached Navy ships only in 1962.
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 most of 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 came to Plomley one evening at home in 1941, and he wrote to the BBC proposing it; his first castaway, Vic Oliver, happened to be Winston Churchill's son-in-law.
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' revival came as Detroit lost coach Jack Adams, suspended indefinitely for going after the referee; no North American team had won a playoff series from 3–0 down before.
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., a name handed down from the Kentucky abolitionist his father was named after; in 1964 he renounced it as a 'slave name'.
Q 08Which 13th-birthday present, received on 12 June, did Anne Frank turn into her diary?
An autograph book
An autograph book bound in red-checkered cloth became the diary; it was no surprise, since her parents had let her pick it out herself in a bookshop.
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 the name Hopper's wife Jo favoured; she posed for the woman at the counter while he modelled the seated men in a mirror, and the Art Institute of Chicago bought it within months.
Q 10Whose wartime blueprint for social insurance named Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness as 'giants'?
William Beveridge
William Beveridge married his long-time colleague Janet Mair within weeks of publishing it; the report became the founding blueprint of Britain's post-war welfare state.
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 went on coupons, a four-ounce bar of hard soap or three ounces of toilet soap for each one; bread, by contrast, stayed off the ration 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 given a new first name 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 saw almost the whole Congress leadership jailed without trial within hours of Gandhi's speech, yet the Viceroy still called the unrest 'by far the most serious rebellion since 1857'.
Q 22Which Latin American country declared war on Germany and Italy on 22 August after U-boats sank a string of its 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 Chicago football ground did Fermi's pile go critical on 2 December?
Stagg Field
Jimi Hendrix became James Marshall Hendrix in 1946, renamed in honour of his father Al and Al's late brother Leon Marshall; he was the eldest of his mother Lucille's five children.
Q 14Which future US president was born on 20 November at St Mary's Hospital in Scranton, Pennsylvania?
Joe Biden
Joe Biden's family left Scranton for Delaware when he was ten, after his father's work dried up; he overcame a childhood stutter by memorising lines of Emerson and Yeats.
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 left the yards at the end of the 1960s to sing folk, sharing a stage in the Humblebums with Gerry Rafferty before the jokes between songs took over the act.
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 roll of English football memories with the words 'Nobby dancing'.
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 the island's flag in 1943, where it remains today.
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 was one of 14 killed on Eagle's Rock near Dunbeath, on a flight bound for Iceland; only the rear gunner survived, and the dukedom passed to a son of six.
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's west stands hid a rackets court where Chicago Pile-1 produced the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction; the coded phone call afterwards announced that 'the Italian navigator' had landed in the New World.
Q 24Which four-engined RAF bomber, developed from the troublesome Manchester, flew its first mission in March?
Avro Lancaster
The Avro Lancaster's debut by No. 44 Squadron was laying mines in the Heligoland Bight; Roy Chadwick's redesign had replaced the Manchester's two unreliable Vulture engines with four Rolls-Royce Merlins.
Q 25Which Warner Bros. bird 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 familiar yellow canary.
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 insisted Fred Astaire had been offered the part first, though the producer said he had never considered anyone else. In the film Cagney's sister Jeanne played Cohan's sister.
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 always credited his editor, John W. Campbell, with spelling the laws out in a 1940 conversation; Campbell insisted they were already in Asimov's head and only needed stating.
Q 30Which Vera Lynn song was written by two Americans, one perhaps unaware that its bird is unknown in Britain?
The White Cliffs of Dover
The White Cliffs of Dover was written in 1941, while the United States was still neutral, by Walter Kent and lyricist Nat Burton; Vera Lynn's recording the next year made it a British wartime standard.