Military History
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50 free Military History trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Military history is where the rest of history gets decided in a hurry. A single afternoon on a muddy field or in a narrow strait has ended dynasties, redrawn borders and made the names of commanders who are still argued over centuries later. It is also full of the strange and the human: desperate gambles, cover stories, lucky storms and soldiers who became legends by accident. This quiz ranges across more than two thousand years of warfare. Expect ancient generals and the armies of Greece and Rome, medieval sieges and knights, the great sea fights of the age of sail, the American Revolution and Civil War, and the trenches, beaches and air raids of the two world wars. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you pick up the story behind the battle as you play. The questions start broad and get tougher, so the set works for a pub quiz night, a history classroom or a solo test of how much you remember. War buffs will find a few deep cuts along the way; everyone else will leave with a good story or two.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Dutch exotic dancer was shot by a French firing squad in 1917 as a convicted German spy?
Mata Hari
Mata Hari, by one eyewitness account, refused a blindfold before twelve French soldiers shot her at Vincennes. Later biographers argue the French Army needed a scapegoat.
Q 02Which Japanese word first named the typhoons that wrecked Mongol invasion fleets in 1274 and 1281?
Kamikaze
Kamikaze means divine wind, a name given to the storms that scattered Kublai Khan's ships. Japan revived the word in 1944 for suicide pilots who flew their aircraft into Allied warships.
Q 03Which aid movement grew from Henry Dunant's horror at the wounded abandoned at Solferino in 1859?
Red Cross
The Red Cross began with a five-man committee that Dunant joined in Geneva in February 1863. His campaign earned him a share of the first Nobel Peace Prize in 1901.
Q 04Which English king, the last to die in battle, was killed fighting Henry Tudor at Bosworth in 1485?
Richard III
Richard III lay in a lost grave for more than 500 years until archaeologists found his skeleton beneath a Leicester car park in 2012. DNA from his sister's descendants confirmed the identity.
Q 05Which war between English and French kings began in 1337 over the French throne?
Hundred Years' War
The Hundred Years' War actually ran for 116 years, broken up by long truces. It was triggered when Edward III of England claimed the crown of France.
Q 06Which Carthaginian general led war elephants over the Alps to invade Italy in the Second Punic War?
Hannibal
Hannibal's elephants fought in his victory at the Trebia, but by Polybius's account all but one died in the cold that followed. He still routed Roman armies at Lake Trasimene and Cannae.
Q 07Which Native American nation's language was the basis of the code US Marines used at Iwo Jima?
Navajo
Navajo had no word for submarine, so the code talkers called it an iron fish. Six of them worked around the clock during the first two days of the battle for Iwo Jima.
Q 08Which new weapon did the British first send into battle at Flers-Courcelette in September 1916?
The tank
Tank began as a cover name: to keep the project secret, the first hulls were described as water carriers. The label stuck after the machines went into action in 1916.
Q 09During which war did British troops occupy Washington and burn the White House and the Capitol?
War of 1812
The War of 1812 brought the only capture of the US capital by a foreign power since the Revolutionary War. British troops torched the White House in August 1814 after routing an American army at Bladensburg.
Q 10Which nurse, called the Lady with the Lamp, tended British wounded at Scutari in the Crimean War?
Florence Nightingale
Florence Nightingale earned the nickname on her night rounds of the wards. She was also an innovator in statistics, famous for the polar area diagram she used to show what was killing soldiers.
Q 11On which Greek battlefield did Athens defeat a Persian army sent by Darius I in 490 BC?
Marathon
Marathon gave its name to the 26.2-mile race through a legend that a messenger ran to Athens with news of the victory. Michel Bréal suggested the event for the first modern Olympic Games in 1896.
Q 12Which narrow pass did King Leonidas and 300 Spartans hold to the death against a Persian army?
Thermopylae
Thermopylae held for two days until a local man, Ephialtes, showed the Persians a path behind the Greek lines. Leonidas then sent most of the army away and stayed with 300 Spartans and 700 Thespians.
Q 13Which conqueror, tutored by Aristotle, broke Persian power at Gaugamela and never lost a battle?
Alexander the Great
Q 21Which French heroine, burned at the stake at about nineteen, helped lift the siege of Orléans?
Joan of Arc
Joan of Arc reached Orléans with a relief army at about seventeen, and nine days later the English abandoned the siege. She was canonized in 1920.
Q 22At which 1415 battle did Henry V's outnumbered army, mostly archers, beat the French?
Agincourt
Agincourt was won by an army in which English and Welsh archers made up nearly 80 percent of the men. Henry V led his troops in person and took part in the hand-to-hand fighting.
Q 23Which sultan of Egypt and Syria crushed a crusader army at Hattin in 1187 and then retook Jerusalem?
Saladin
Alexander the Great had, by the age of 30, created an empire stretching from Greece to northwestern India. He took the Macedonian throne at 20, after his father was assassinated.
Q 14Which small river did Julius Caesar lead a legion across in 49 BC, starting a Roman civil war?
Rubicon
The Rubicon marked the line between Cisalpine Gaul and Italy proper, so by marching troops over it Caesar deliberately broke the law limiting his command. Crossing it became an idiom for passing the point of no return.
Q 15Which Thracian gladiator escaped a training school near Capua and led a slave revolt against Rome?
Spartacus
Spartacus broke out with about 70 fellow gladiators and his following swelled into an army that Crassus finally crushed. Some 6,000 captured survivors were crucified along the Appian Way.
Q 16Which king of Epirus beat Rome at Asculum at such cost that ruinous victories still carry his name?
Pyrrhus
Pyrrhus gave English the phrase Pyrrhic victory, coined from wins that cost him unacceptably heavy losses. He lost all his gains in Italy after the Battle of Beneventum in 275 BC.
Q 17Where in Germania did Arminius ambush and destroy three Roman legions under Varus in AD 9?
Teutoburg Forest
Teutoburg Forest ended Rome's run of expansion under Augustus, and afterwards the Rhine became the empire's frontier. Arminius had Roman citizenship and a Roman military education, which helped him deceive Varus.
Q 18Which seafaring raiders shocked Christian Europe in 793 by sacking the monastery of Lindisfarne?
Vikings
Vikings killed monks, drowned others and carried off captives and church treasure at Lindisfarne. The attack of 8 June 793 is often treated as the start of the Viking Age.
Q 19Which embroidered cloth, nearly 70 metres long, depicts the Norman conquest of England in 1066?
Bayeux Tapestry
The Bayeux Tapestry is technically an embroidery, since its scenes are stitched rather than woven. It was probably commissioned by Bishop Odo, the half-brother of William the Conqueror.
Q 20Which hilltop fortress in modern Israel fell to Rome in AD 73 after engineers raised a siege ramp?
Masada
Masada was breached after the besiegers hauled a siege tower with a battering ram up a ramp built against the western face. By Josephus's account, the defenders chose mass suicide over capture.
Saladin was a Kurd who used his Egyptian power base to wrest control of Syria from his rivals. His victory at Hattin restored Muslim military dominance in the Levant.
Q 24Which Ottoman sultan conquered Constantinople in 1453 at the age of 21, ending the Byzantine Empire?
Mehmed II
Mehmed II battered the city's walls with cannons and bombards, a sign that ramparts could no longer keep invaders out. He made Constantinople the new Ottoman capital in place of Adrianople.
Q 25Which Frankish leader, grandfather of Charlemagne, beat an Umayyad army at Tours in 732?
Charles Martel
Charles Martel got his byname, an Old French word for hammer, from later chronicles. He was never king: he ruled the Franks as Mayor of the Palace.
Q 26Which Spanish conquistador scuttled his own ships before marching on the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan?
Hernán Cortés
Hernán Cortés sank the fleet to eliminate any idea of retreat among his men. The expedition he led went on to bring down the Aztec Empire.
Q 27Which English monarch addressed troops at Tilbury in 1588 as they awaited the Spanish Armada?
Elizabeth I
Elizabeth I left her bodyguard and went among the soldiers with an escort of only six men. The Armada had in fact been driven from the Strait of Dover eleven days earlier.
Q 28Which 1571 sea battle, the last great clash of galleys, cost Cervantes the use of his left hand?
Lepanto
Lepanto saw a Holy League fleet from Messina defeat the Ottoman navy off western Greece. Cervantes took three wounds aboard the Marquesa, two in the chest and one that left his arm useless.
Q 29Which country's Admiral Yi Sun-sin used turtle ships to beat Japanese invasion fleets in the 1590s?
Korea
Korea's Yi Sun-sin never lost a battle during the Imjin War. At Myeongnyang he led 13 ships to victory over a Japanese fleet of at least 133.
Q 30Which Japanese warrior class lost the right to carry swords in public under an 1876 Meiji edict?
Samurai
Samurai privileges were stripped away in steps: the 1876 edict left swords only to former lords, the military and the police. An earlier decree had let them cut off their topknots.