Red Cross Trivia
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45 free Red Cross trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
40 free Red Cross trivia questions with answers. This Red Cross trivia quiz tells the story of the world's largest humanitarian movement: the Battle of Solferino that horrified Henry Dunant, the Committee of Five in Geneva, the First Geneva Convention of 1864, the four 1949 conventions, and the emblems, from the reversed Swiss flag to the Red Crescent, the Red Lion and Sun and the Red Crystal. It also covers Clara Barton and the American Red Cross, the British Red Cross, the League that became the IFRC, the ICRC's three Nobel Peace Prizes, the seven Fundamental Principles, World Red Cross Day and the movement's blood services. Easy questions suit first-aid classes and volunteer socials; the harder ones on dates and people will test students of humanitarian history. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries before publishing.
30 of 45 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which future animation pioneer drove an ambulance for the American Red Cross in France at the end of World War I?
Walt Disney
Walt Disney served as a Red Cross ambulance driver in France, then returned to Kansas City in 1919, where a commercial art studio job introduced him to Ub Iwerks, his future collaborator.
Q 02The 1859 battle whose wounded inspired the Red Cross was fought near which Italian town?
Solferino
Solferino, in Lombardy, saw losses so heavy that they helped bring about the armistice that ended the war.
Q 03Which crime novelist volunteered as a nurse at a Red Cross hospital in her hometown of Torquay during World War I?
Agatha Christie
Agatha Christie began her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, in 1916 during that war work; published in 1920, it introduced Hercule Poirot.
Q 04Which national Red Cross society ran the 1945 'White Buses' rescue of concentration-camp prisoners?
The Swedish Red Cross
The Swedish Red Cross, under its vice-president Count Folke Bernadotte, negotiated with Himmler to bring some 15,000 prisoners out of German camps in white-painted buses in March and April 1945.
Q 05Two of the ICRC's five founders in 1863 shared which profession?
Doctors
Doctors Louis Appia and Théodore Maunoir were the surgeons among the five, whose campaign produced the first Geneva Convention, obliging armies to treat wounded enemies too.
Q 06Which Swiss general sat on the five-man committee that founded the Red Cross?
Guillaume-Henri Dufour
Guillaume-Henri Dufour had put down the separatist Sonderbund in 1847 with notable restraint, and later presided over the congress that drew up the first Geneva Convention.
Q 07Using the red cross emblem to trick and kill an enemy is which war crime?
Perfidy
Perfidy with the red cross is banned because such misuse can weaken the emblem's protection and put genuine aid workers in danger.
Q 08Which French pacifist shared the first Nobel Peace Prize in 1901 with the Red Cross co-founder?
Frédéric Passy
Frédéric Passy wrote a plea for peace in the newspaper Le Temps during the 1867 Luxembourg crisis, and that year he founded a peace league.
Q 09World Red Cross and Red Crescent Day falls on 8 May because that date marks what?
Henry Dunant's birthday
Henry Dunant's birthday, 8 May 1828, marks the day; the businessman went bankrupt in 1867, left his home city and spent decades in poverty.
Q 10In which Swiss village did Dunant spend his final years and die in 1910?
Heiden
Heiden's hospital took in the destitute founder in 1892, and a journalist who met him there in 1895 revived his fame and brought him new honours.
Q 11Besides the Red Cross, which other organisation did Dunant help found, starting its Geneva chapter in 1852?
The YMCA
The YMCA's Geneva chapter was started with Dunant's help in 1852, and three years later he took part in the Paris meeting that founded the YMCA's world alliance.
Q 12Which American novelist was badly wounded in Italy in 1918 while serving as an American Red Cross ambulance driver?
Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway fell for Red Cross nurse Agnes von Kurowsky while recovering in Milan; she declined to marry him, and the war gave him material for A Farewell to Arms.
Q 13Which state first used the Red Crescent in the 1870s?
The Ottoman Empire
Q 21Which American nurse, known as the 'Angel of the Battlefield', founded the American Red Cross in 1881?
Clara Barton
Clara Barton brought supplies and nursing care to soldiers on Civil War battlefields, and she later lobbied for years until the US joined the Geneva Convention.
Q 22Under which president did the US finally join the Geneva Convention, after years of lobbying by the American Red Cross founder?
Chester Arthur
Chester Arthur was president when the Senate ratified the treaty, and Congress later gave the American Red Cross a federal charter.
Q 23The 1900 hurricane in which Texas city was the American Red Cross founder's last field operation?
Galveston
The Ottoman Empire's insistence got the red crescent accepted beside the cross, and it is now the emblem of the national societies in most Muslim countries.
Q 14Which country used the Red Lion and Sun emblem from 1924 to 1980?
Iran
Iran, under the shahs, had the red lion and sun recognised in 1929; the Islamic Republic switched to the red crescent in 1980 while reserving the right to revive the old emblem.
Q 15What is the name of the fourth protection emblem, adopted by a vote in 2005?
The Red Crystal
The Red Crystal came with Protocol III in 2005, letting national societies that use neither a cross nor a crescent take part in the movement.
Q 16Israel's national society, admitted to the movement in 2006, is called what?
Magen David Adom
Magen David Adom was kept out of the movement for decades because it would not drop its red Star of David emblem, and it joined alongside the Palestine Red Crescent Society.
Q 17Which group got a Geneva Convention of its own for the first time in 1949?
Civilians
Civilians got the Fourth Geneva Convention, drafted in response to World War II's atrocities; it was the first Geneva Convention not written for combatants.
Q 18Which Nazi ghetto was dressed up to fool Red Cross visitors in 1944?
Theresienstadt
Theresienstadt was made to look less crowded for the visit, as the Nazis deported thousands of its residents to Auschwitz beforehand.
Q 19Which royal toured an Angolan minefield on a 1997 Red Cross trip?
Princess Diana
Princess Diana spoke in favour of banning anti-personnel mines on the trip, and the Ottawa Treaty banning them was signed that December.
Q 20Besides name, rank and serial number, what must a questioned prisoner of war give?
Date of birth
Date of birth completes the list, and a prisoner who wilfully withholds these details may lose privileges of rank or status.
Galveston's 1900 storm drew the 78-year-old founder into the field for the last time, and four years later critics inside the society forced her to resign.
Q 24What kind of disaster in Michigan in 1881 prompted the American Red Cross's first relief effort?
Forest fires
Forest fires in Michigan's Thumb region gave the new society its first relief work, fitting the founder's pitch that it could help in peacetime disasters, not only wars.
Q 25Which future president led 1927 Mississippi flood relief alongside the Red Cross?
Herbert Hoover
Herbert Hoover supervised the relief as commerce secretary, and the flood fed the Great Migration of Black Southerners to northern cities.
Q 26Who was the first medical director of the American Red Cross blood programme in 1941?
Charles Drew
Charles Drew had run the Blood for Britain project, and he criticised the military's rule that the Red Cross first exclude, then segregate, blood from Black donors.
Q 27The British Red Cross was formed in 1870 at the outbreak of which war?
The Franco-Prussian War
The Franco-Prussian War prompted a public meeting in London on 4 August 1870 that founded the society, which then aided both warring armies.
Q 28The ICRC's first field mission, in 1864, went to a war between Prussia and which country?
Denmark
Denmark's war saw ICRC delegates work on each side of the front line, beginning the ICRC's role as a neutral go-between for warring parties.
Q 29Which French pacifist writer volunteered at the ICRC's prisoner-of-war agency and won the 1915 Nobel Prize in Literature?
Romain Rolland
Romain Rolland protested against the war in his 1915 pamphlet 'Above the Battle'.
Q 30Which Norwegian explorer, the ICRC's partner in repatriating WWI prisoners, devised a refugee passport?
Fridtjof Nansen
Fridtjof Nansen, as high commissioner for repatriating prisoners, sent more than 400,000 of them home, and his 'Nansen passport' gave stateless refugees papers.