1943
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50 free 1943 trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
In 1943 the Second World War turned. The Axis advance stalled on every front, Allied leaders began planning the invasion of Europe, and at home rationing reached into kitchens, closets and even pocket change. It was also a year of big bands, radio crooners, Saturday matinee serials and Broadway openings that people still hum today. This quiz covers the whole year: the battles and secret missions, life on the home front, the inventions and discoveries, the films, songs, books and stage shows, the champions in baseball, football and horse racing, and the well-known names who were born or died in those twelve months. It is written for anyone born in 1943, anyone who remembers it, and anyone planning a milestone birthday party, a reunion or a family game night. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you can play it straight through as a game or print the questions for a group.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which grocery item did US Food Administrator Claude Wickard ban for seven weeks in early 1943 as a wartime saving?
Sliced bread
Sliced bread needed heavier wax-paper wrapping than whole loaves, so officials hoped a ban would save paper. Public complaints helped end it on March 8, 1943.
Q 02Which drug did Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann test on himself in April 1943 before a famously strange bicycle ride home?
LSD
LSD had sat on a shelf for five years before Hofmann absorbed a trace by accident and decided to try a measured dose. April 19 is now known as Bicycle Day.
Q 03Which children's classic did exiled French pilot Antoine de Saint-Exupéry publish in New York in April 1943?
The Little Prince
The Little Prince was written in New York and on Long Island and reached France only after the liberation. Its author vanished on a reconnaissance flight in July 1944.
Q 04Which Scandinavian company did 17-year-old Ingvar Kamprad found in 1943 as a small mail-order business?
IKEA
IKEA joins Kamprad's initials to Elmtaryd, the family farm, and Agunnaryd, his home village. Furniture only entered the range five years after the founding.
Q 05Which future US president towed an injured crewman to safety after a Japanese destroyer sank PT-109 in August 1943?
John F. Kennedy
John F. Kennedy swam with the burned sailor's life-jacket strap clenched in his teeth. A message scratched on a coconut later helped bring the stranded crew's rescue.
Q 06Which government building in the Washington, DC, area was completed in January 1943 after only 16 months of work?
The Pentagon
The Pentagon was built with concrete ramps between its floors rather than elevators, a design that saved scarce wartime steel. Ground was broken on September 11, 1941.
Q 07British spies dressed a corpse as a Royal Marine in 1943's Operation Mincemeat to mask the invasion of which island?
Sicily
Sicily was painted as a mere feint in the fake letters, which pointed to Greece and Sardinia. Germany shifted reinforcements to both, and the real target received none.
Q 08Rodgers and Hammerstein's first musical together, a Broadway smash from March 1943, is named after which US state?
Oklahoma
Oklahoma! ran for an unprecedented 2,212 performances and earned a special Pulitzer Prize. During its out-of-town tryouts the show was still called Away We Go!
Q 09Which Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman romance reached general US release in January 1943 and later won Best Picture?
Casablanca
Casablanca was sent into wide release to cash in on headlines about the Allied leaders' conference in the Moroccan city. Its New York premiere had followed the city's capture in 1942.
Q 10Which toy did naval engineer Richard James invent in 1943 after a part knocked off a shelf seemed to walk?
Slinky
Slinky was an instant hit when James first demonstrated it at a Gimbels department store in November 1945. The first 400 sold in 90 minutes.
Q 11In which city did Ike Sewell and Richard Riccardo open the first Pizzeria Uno in 1943?
Chicago
Chicago's deep-dish pizza is usually traced to Uno, though its first pizza chef, Rudy Malnati, is also credited with the recipe. His sons later opened rival deep-dish restaurants.
Q 12Which French naval officer co-invented the Aqua-Lung diving gear with engineer Émile Gagnan in 1943?
Jacques Cousteau
Jacques Cousteau adapted a regulator Gagnan had built for gas generators during a wartime fuel shortage. He used early prototypes that same year to shoot the film Épaves.
Q 13Which Beatle, born in Liverpool in February 1943, was nicknamed the quiet one of the group?
George Harrison
Q 21Which deposed dictator did German commandos free from a mountaintop hotel in a glider raid in September 1943?
Mussolini
Benito Mussolini had been a prisoner for seven weeks, ever since his own Grand Council voted against him and the king dismissed him. Hitler then made him figurehead of a puppet state.
Q 22Which structures did RAF 617 Squadron attack in Germany's Ruhr region in May 1943 with Barnes Wallis's bouncing bombs?
Dams
Dams on the Möhne and Eder rivers were breached, sending catastrophic floods down the valleys below. The raid earned 617 Squadron its lasting nickname, the Dam Busters.
Q 23In which city did Jewish fighters hold out against SS troops for four weeks in the ghetto uprising of April 1943?
Warsaw
George Harrison won over John Lennon by playing the instrumental Raunchy on the top deck of a Liverpool bus. Lennon had at first thought him, just turned 15, too young to join.
Q 14Which rock frontman, born in Dartford, Kent, in July 1943, studied at the London School of Economics before fame?
Mick Jagger
Mick Jagger was studying finance and accounting on a government grant when the Rolling Stones took off. He had first met Keith Richards as a primary-school classmate.
Q 15Which actor, born in Manhattan in August 1943 to two painters, won Oscars for The Godfather Part II and Raging Bull?
Robert De Niro
Robert De Niro was nicknamed Bobby Milk as a boy in Little Italy because of his pale complexion. His father disapproved of the street kids he ran around with there.
Q 16Which blues-rock singer, born in Port Arthur, Texas, in January 1943, broke through at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival?
Janis Joplin
Janis Joplin sang at Monterey with a then little-known San Francisco band, Big Brother and the Holding Company. She died of an overdose in October 1970, aged 27.
Q 17Which tennis champion, born in California in November 1943, beat Bobby Riggs in 1973's Battle of the Sexes?
Billie Jean King
Billie Jean King played softball until she was 11, when her parents steered her toward a sport they thought more ladylike. Her brother Randy pitched for the San Francisco Giants.
Q 18Which chess prodigy, born in March 1943, became a grandmaster at 15 and won the world title in Reykjavik in 1972?
Bobby Fischer
Bobby Fischer took the crown from Boris Spassky of the USSR after first choosing Belgrade as the venue. Iceland's capital had been his opponent's pick.
Q 19Which comic-book hero made his first screen appearance in a 15-chapter 1943 Columbia serial starring Lewis Wilson?
Batman
Batman's wartime serial introduced the Batcave and its secret entrance through a grandfather clock. Both ideas quickly became a permanent part of the character's story.
Q 20At which Soviet city did Friedrich Paulus surrender Germany's Sixth Army in 1943, a day after becoming field marshal?
Stalingrad
Stalingrad made Paulus the first German field marshal to be captured alive. Hitler had promoted him expecting that he would take his own life rather than give up.
Warsaw's ghetto fighters ambushed German columns with pistols, grenades and Molotov cocktails thrown from alleyways, sewers and windows. It was the largest Jewish revolt of the war.
Q 24In which Middle Eastern capital did the Allied Big Three leaders hold their first joint meeting in November 1943?
Tehran
Tehran's Soviet embassy hosted the talks, the first time Stalin had met both Western leaders together. They agreed that an invasion of northern France would come by May 1944.
Q 25Which American general was chosen in December 1943 as Supreme Allied Commander for the coming invasion of France?
Dwight Eisenhower
Dwight Eisenhower was picked over George Marshall, the Army's chief of staff. He had already commanded the Allied landings in North Africa, code-named Operation Torch.
Q 26Which Soviet city gave its name to the July 1943 clash described as the biggest tank battle of World War II?
Kursk
Kursk was the last strategic offensive Germany managed to launch on the Eastern Front. Its losses in men and tanks left the Red Army holding the initiative for the rest of the war.
Q 27To which country did Danish fishermen ferry most of Denmark's Jews in October 1943, ahead of a planned Nazi roundup?
Sweden
Sweden took in more than 7,000 of Denmark's Jews after a German diplomat, Georg Duckwitz, leaked the deportation plan. Their survival rate was among the highest in occupied Europe.
Q 28Which physicist was appointed director of the secret Los Alamos weapons laboratory in New Mexico in 1943?
Robert Oppenheimer
Robert Oppenheimer suggested the remote mesa himself, having spent much of his youth in the area. The lab took over the buildings of the Los Alamos Ranch School.
Q 29Which US president became the first to fly while in office, crossing the Atlantic by flying boat in January 1943?
Franklin Roosevelt
Franklin Roosevelt flew aboard the Dixie Clipper, a Pan Am-crewed Boeing 314, on a 5,500-mile trip in three legs to meet Churchill in Morocco.
Q 30Which wartime icon did Norman Rockwell paint for a May 1943 Saturday Evening Post cover, her foot resting on Mein Kampf?
Rosie the Riveter
Rosie the Riveter sits in a pose Rockwell borrowed from Michelangelo's prophet Isaiah on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. His model was a 19-year-old Vermont telephone operator.