1945 Trivia
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50 free 1945 trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Sep 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 its ballpark?
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 hit after the pilot, advised not to try landing in the fog, flew on over midtown Manhattan; eleven of the fourteen killed were inside.
Q 03Which two royals joined the VE night crowds outside Buckingham Palace incognito?
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 was shot at Carnforth in February 1945, as wartime planners judged the Lancashire junction far enough from the big cities to film there safely.
Q 05Which guitarist, born in Ripley, Surrey, on 30 March, grew up believing his mother was his older sister?
Eric Clapton
Eric Clapton was nine when his mother came back, married to a Canadian soldier, and it left him withdrawn and neglecting school.
Q 06Which actress, born 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 left Nine Mile with his mother at 12 for Trenchtown in Kingston, where he formed a vocal group with Bunny Wailer and Peter Tosh.
Q 08Which children's heroine won a publisher's competition and came out in November, illustrated by Ingrid Vang Nyman?
Pippi Longstocking
Pippi Longstocking had been turned down by the publisher Bonniers before it won first prize in Rabén and Sjögren's competition.
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 missed the ceremony, reportedly ill, and accepted her Oscar in bed, and the film added a murder plot absent from James M. Cain's novel.
Q 11Which Norwegian collaborator was shot at Akershus Fortress on 24 October?
Vidkun Quisling
Vidkun Quisling's name was turned into a common noun for traitor by The Times, and the firing squad did its work at 02:40.
Q 12Which SS chief, caught in disguise, bit a cyanide capsule in British custody on 23 May?
Heinrich Himmler
Heinrich Himmler gave away who he was two days after his arrest, and his body was buried in an unmarked grave near Lüneburg.
Q 13Which Argentine colonel, jailed by army rivals, was freed after workers packed the Plaza de Mayo on 17 October?
Juan Perón
Juan Perón married the actress Eva Duarte within days, and Peronists still celebrate the rally as Loyalty Day; he won the presidency the following February.
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 an alcoholic writer on a 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 1945 US box-office champion starred Bing Crosby as a priest and Ingrid Bergman as a nun?
The Bells of St. Mary's
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 OSS officer Archimedes Patti, who suggested corrections to its opening line; war with France broke out the following year.
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 were cut off after D-Day, and by that winter islanders were near starvation until the Red Cross ship Vega brought food parcels.
Q 16Which former prime minister, the last Liberal to hold the office, died on 26 March?
David Lloyd George
David Lloyd George, who had fought the House of Lords over his 1909 People's Budget, accepted an earldom in his last months.
Q 17Which economist led Britain's talks for the US loan that took until 2006 to repay?
John Maynard Keynes
John Maynard Keynes negotiated the loan in poor health, months before his death in April 1946.
Q 18Which clergyman's 1945 book The Three Railway Engines 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 homes put up on bomb sites after the Second World War?
Prefabs
Prefabs were a stopgap for families who had lost their homes to bombing, yet many were still being lived in decades after they were due to come down.
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 follows the priest and the nun as they try to save their school from being shut down, and it took $8 million in North America on its first run.
Q 24Which cartoon ghost debuted in a 1945 Paramount Noveltoon?
Casper
Casper's rights were sold to Paramount's Famous Studios for about $200, and the ghost became one of the studio's most popular cartoon series.
Q 25Which emperor's 15 August radio address announcing surrender let ordinary Japanese hear their ruler's voice for the first time?
Hirohito
Hirohito had reportedly never been heard by ordinary Japanese, and the night before, rebel officers searched the palace for his recorded speech but 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 men had been shot in August 1944, and Mussolini is said to have remarked, 'for the blood of Piazzale Loreto, we shall pay dearly'.
Q 27Which camp near Munich, opened as one of the Nazis' first 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 was killed by enemy fire on Ie Shima on 18 April?
Ernie Pyle
Ernie Pyle was killed when he raised his head to check on the others in his jeep party, and he was later reburied at Honolulu's Punchbowl cemetery.
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' described the orbit 35,786 km up that is now sometimes called the Clarke orbit in his honour.