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50 free 1945 trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
1945 was the year the lights came back on. Germany's leaders died in a bunker or a British camp, Japan's people listened to their emperor on the radio for the first time, and Britain, having cheered on VE Day, promptly voted its war leader out of office and sent him to Potsdam as an observer. These 50 questions steer past the headlines everyone knows and into the rest of the year: the factory-built houses and discharge outfits of post-war Britain, the radio network that became Radio 2, a cinema romance filmed at a Lancashire junction, a Broadway show that handed Liverpool an anthem, a baseball curse, an 11-win golf streak, a Soviet football tour, the first fluoridated tap water, a paper that named an orbit, and the births of a guitar hero, a reggae star and a future Dame. 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, classroom or a 1945-themed birthday.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which team's World Series, its last for 71 years, saw a tavern owner's goat ejected from Wrigley Field?
Chicago Cubs
The Chicago Cubs lost that series to the Detroit Tigers and did not win a pennant again until 2016, when the 'Curse of the Billy Goat' supposedly laid by William Sianis finally lifted.
Q 02Which New York skyscraper was hit by a B-25 bomber lost in thick fog on 28 July, killing fourteen people?
Empire State Building
The Empire State Building was struck on its north side by a pilot who, disoriented in the fog, turned right instead of left after passing dangerously close to the Chrysler Building; eleven of the dead were inside.
Q 03Which two royals were allowed out of Buckingham Palace incognito on VE night to join the celebrating crowds?
Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret
Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret wandered among the crowds unrecognised, an escapade the 2015 film A Royal Night Out stretched into a whole evening of adventures.
Q 04Which David Lean film, shot at Carnforth station with Celia Johnson as a suburban wife, reached cinemas in November?
Brief Encounter
Brief Encounter runs its doomed romance to Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto, and Carnforth station in Lancashire still keeps its period features and draws fans on pilgrimage.
Q 05Which guitarist, born in Ripley, Surrey, on 30 March, grew up believing his mother was his older sister?
Eric Clapton
Eric Clapton was raised by his grandmother Rose and her second husband Jack Clapp as their own; his real mother Patricia was 16 when she had him by a Canadian soldier.
Q 06Which actress, born Ilyena Mironoff in Hammersmith on 26 July, later won an Oscar for playing Elizabeth II?
Helen Mirren
Helen Mirren's father Vasily Mironoff came from exiled Russian nobility and played viola in the London Philharmonic before the war; her Academy Award came for The Queen.
Q 07Which reggae star was born on 6 February at his grandfather's farm in Nine Mile, Jamaica, to a white Jamaican father?
Bob Marley
Bob Marley's father Norval, of Welsh ancestry, styled himself 'Captain' despite having been only a private in the British Army; at 12 the boy moved with his mother to Trenchtown in Kingston.
Q 08Which Astrid Lindgren heroine won a publisher's competition and came out in November, illustrated by Ingrid Vang Nyman?
Pippi Longstocking
Pippi Longstocking placed first in the Rabén and Sjögren contest after the manuscript arrived in May, and was followed by Pippi Goes on Board and Pippi in the South Seas by 1948.
Q 09Which Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, opened in April, gave Liverpool FC its anthem 'You'll Never Walk Alone'?
Carousel
Carousel moved Ferenc Molnár's Budapest play Liliom to the Maine coast; Gerry and the Pacemakers' 1963 number one made the song a fixture before Liverpool home matches.
Q 10Which actress, absent from the screen for nearly two years, made her comeback in Mildred Pierce and won Best Actress?
Joan Crawford
Joan Crawford's win was greeted by Pauline Kael with the jibe that her 'heavy breathing was certified as acting'; the film added a murder plot absent from James M. Cain's novel.
Q 11Which Norwegian collaborator, his surname already a word for traitor, was shot at Akershus Fortress on 24 October?
Vidkun Quisling
Vidkun Quisling's name was turned into a common noun by The Times, whose 15 April 1940 leader was headed 'Quislings everywhere'; the firing squad did its work at 02:40.
Q 12Which SS chief, caught in disguise by the British, bit a cyanide capsule during a medical check on 23 May?
Heinrich Himmler
Heinrich Himmler had been shuttled between several camps before a doctor examined him at Second Army headquarters; his body went into an unmarked grave near Lüneburg.
Q 13Which Argentine colonel, freed from jail by a rally in the Plaza de Mayo, married actress Eva Duarte days later?
Q 21In Anchors Aweigh, Gene Kelly dances with which animated character, borrowed from MGM's own cartoon unit?
Jerry Mouse
Jerry Mouse, voiced by Sara Berner, plays a mouse king who has outlawed singing and dancing in his kingdom until Kelly's sailor cheers him up.
Q 22Which Billy Wilder film, with Ray Milland as a writer on a four-day binge, won Best Picture for 1945?
The Lost Weekend
The Lost Weekend also shared the Grand Prix at the first Cannes Film Festival in 1946, a double not repeated until Marty in 1955 and then not again until Parasite in 2019.
Q 23Which film, with Bing Crosby as a priest and Ingrid Bergman as a nun, was 1945's top-grossing US release?
The Bells of St. Mary's
Juan Perón
Juan Perón married Eva on 22 October, five days after the workers' demonstration that Argentina still commemorates as Loyalty Day; he won the presidency the following February.
Q 14Who proclaimed Vietnam's independence in Hanoi on 2 September, quoting the American Declaration of Independence?
Ho Chi Minh
Ho Chi Minh had read a draft to American OSS officers in late August, who found it strikingly close to the 1776 text; France refused to recognise the new republic and war followed.
Q 15Which British territory, occupied by Germany since 1940, was liberated by HMS Bulldog on 9 May, the day after VE Day?
The Channel Islands
The Channel Islands' German garrison surrendered unconditionally aboard HMS Bulldog at dawn off St Peter Port, Guernsey, ending an occupation that had begun on 30 June 1940.
Q 16Which former prime minister, the last Liberal to hold the office, died on 26 March, weeks after being made an earl?
David Lloyd George
David Lloyd George was created Earl Lloyd-George of Dwyfor on 12 February but never lived to take his seat in the Lords; he died of cancer at 82 with his wife Frances and daughter Megan at his side.
Q 17In which year did Britain finally repay the $3.75 billion loan it negotiated from the United States in December 1945?
2006
The loan was settled in 2006 with a last instalment of about $83 million, having been negotiated by John Maynard Keynes at 2 per cent interest; Canada lent a further $1.19 billion.
Q 18Which clergyman's The Three Railway Engines, out on 12 May, began the series that produced Thomas the Tank Engine?
Wilbert Awdry
Wilbert Awdry's engines first ran in 1945 but Thomas himself only arrived in the second book, in 1946; Awdry wrote 26 books before retiring in 1972 and his son Christopher added 16 more.
Q 19What did Britons call the temporary bungalows, designed to last ten years, that went up on bomb sites from 1945?
Prefabs
Prefabs went up astonishingly fast: an AIROH aluminium type was erected on a bombed site in Oxford Street in four hours, and 156,623 were built before the programme ended in 1951.
Q 20Which surrealist painter designed the dream sequence for Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound, starring Ingrid Bergman?
Salvador Dalí
Salvador Dalí's designs ran so long and complicated once filmed that producer David O. Selznick had most of the footage cut; Miklós Rózsa's theremin-laced score won the Oscar.
The Bells of St. Mary's took $8 million in North America and turns up on the Bedford Falls cinema marquee in It's a Wonderful Life, which shares its co-star Henry Travers.
Q 24Which cartoon ghost who would rather make friends than scare people debuted in a 1945 Paramount Noveltoon?
Casper
Casper went on to star in 55 theatrical cartoons up to 1959, then television series, comics and a 1995 live-action film.
Q 25What made the Japanese emperor's 15 August radio broadcast announcing surrender unprecedented for ordinary listeners?
They had never heard his voice
They had never heard his voice because no emperor had ever spoken on radio; rebel officers spent the night before ransacking the palace for the recording and never found it.
Q 26In which city were the bodies of Mussolini and Clara Petacci dumped in the Piazzale Loreto for a crowd to abuse?
Milan
Milan's Piazzale Loreto was where fifteen partisans had been shot in August 1944, prompting Mussolini's remark that 'for the blood of Piazzale Loreto, we shall pay dearly'.
Q 27Which camp near Munich, the first the Nazis opened in 1933, was liberated by American troops on 29 April?
Dachau
Dachau opened on 22 March 1933 and was the longest-running of all the camps; so many units reached its sub-camps that several US divisions are officially credited as liberators.
Q 28Who read Indonesia's two-sentence proclamation of independence in Jakarta on 17 August, days after Japan's surrender?
Sukarno
Sukarno read it with Mohammad Hatta at his side before the red-and-white flag was raised; the Netherlands only recognised 17 August 1945 as the date of independence in 2023.
Q 29Which Pulitzer-winning war correspondent, the GI's favourite, was killed by enemy fire on Ie Shima on 18 April?
Ernie Pyle
Ernie Pyle was buried on the island between an infantry private and a combat engineer, still wearing his helmet; his 1944 Pulitzer honoured columns written from the 'dogface' soldier's view.
Q 30Which science-fiction author proposed geostationary communications satellites in Wireless World in October?
Arthur C. Clarke
Arthur C. Clarke's paper 'Extra-Terrestrial Relays' earned the 36,000-kilometre geostationary orbit its official name from the International Astronomical Union: the Clarke Orbit.