The Blitz Trivia
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57 free The Blitz trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The Blitz was eight months of night bombing, from 7 September 1940 to May 1941, and it hit far more than London. This quiz walks through the whole campaign: the first raids on the docks, 56 nights out of 57 in the capital, the Second Great Fire of London on 29 December, the Moonlight Sonata raid on Coventry, and the assaults on Liverpool, Belfast, Clydebank, Hull, Plymouth and Swansea that are too often left out. The home-front questions cover how people actually got through it: Anderson shelters in the garden, Morrison shelters under the dining table, 177,000 people a night sleeping in the Underground, Chislehurst Caves, the blackout, gas masks, evacuation and the WVS. There is also room for the technology of the Battle of the Beams, the first airborne-radar kill, Ed Murrow's broadcasts, Myra Hess's lunchtime concerts and the famous photograph of St Paul's dome above the smoke. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the Blitz and the individual raids, shelters and people involved, so the dates, tonnages and casualty figures will stand up to a history teacher.
30 of 57 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Hitler ended the Blitz in May 1941 to invade which country?
Soviet Union
Soviet Union: after eight months Hitler called off the raids to mass his bombers for the June 1941 invasion, leaving Britain battered but still in the war.
Q 02The word 'Blitz' is a shortened form of Blitzkrieg; what does 'Blitz' mean in German?
Lightning
Lightning: 'Blitzkrieg', lightning war, named Germany's fast surprise attacks, yet the shortened word stuck to a bombing campaign that dragged on for eight months.
Q 03Which now-famous poster was printed in 1939 for use after heavy air raids, yet never officially issued?
Keep Calm and Carry On
Keep Calm and Carry On was held back for the bombing, then most of its 2.45 million copies were pulped in a 1940 paper shortage; it stayed almost unknown until one surfaced in a bookshop in 2000.
Q 04Which Luftwaffe commander-in-chief joined Hitler in ordering the switch to bombing London in September 1940?
Hermann Göring
Hermann Göring and Hitler changed tactics in fury after RAF bombers raided Berlin in late August 1940, turning the Luftwaffe from fighter airfields to London itself.
Q 05Which medal did the King create in September 1940, weeks into the Blitz, chiefly to honour civilian bravery?
The George Cross
The George Cross came in the Blitz's third week, when no existing award suited civilian heroes; the King later gave one to the entire island of Malta for its people's wartime gallantry.
Q 06The firestorm raid on the City of 29 December 1940 became known as what?
The Second Great Fire of London
The Second Great Fire of London got its name that night, when an American reporter cabled his office that it had begun; the flames swept the same streets that had burned in 1666.
Q 07On 29 December 1940, what hampered London firefighters trying to draw water from the Thames to fight the firestorm?
Low tide
Low tide left the river at an unusually low ebb on the very night bombs fractured the City's water mains, so firefighters ran short of water as the Square Mile burned.
Q 08Herbert Mason's 1940 photograph, hailed as 'War's Greatest Picture', shows which London landmark rising above the smoke?
St Paul's Cathedral
St Paul's Cathedral, shot from the Daily Mail's roof during the raid of 29-30 December, became a symbol of defiance, though the Mail cropped out many of the wrecked buildings in the foreground before printing it.
Q 09Which children's classic opens with four siblings sent out of London to escape the air raids?
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe sends Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy to a professor's country house to avoid the bombing, and Lucy finds Narnia while exploring its spare rooms.
Q 10What was the German codename for the devastating raid on Coventry of 14 November 1940?
Operation Moonlight Sonata
Operation Moonlight Sonata was timed for a full moon: some 500 bombers found the city bathed in brilliant moonlight, and the raid went on for more than ten hours.
Q 11After Kiel, with which other German city devastated by Allied bombing did Coventry twin as a gesture of reconciliation?
Dresden
Dresden, firebombed in 1945, became the twin of a city whose own ruin had given German propaganda a new verb: to 'coventrate', meaning to flatten a place from the air.
Q 12Which architect designed the new Coventry Cathedral, leaving the bombed ruin of the old one standing beside it?
Basil Spence
Basil Spence beat more than 200 rival designs in a 1950 competition by keeping the roofless shell instead of rebuilding it, and the cathedral that made him a household name also brought him a knighthood.
Q 13Group Captain F. W. Winterbotham's 1974 book claimed Churchill let Coventry burn to protect which secret?
Ultra
Q 21In March 1943, 173 people were crushed to death entering the shelter at which East London Tube station?
Bethnal Green
Bethnal Green's disaster involved no bomb at all: as a crowd hurried down the dark, wet stairway, a woman carrying a baby fell, and within seconds some 300 people were piled up behind her.
Q 22Swing bandleader Ken 'Snakehips' Johnson was killed mid-show in March 1941 when a bomb hit which London nightclub?
The Café de Paris
The Café de Paris lay in a basement beneath a cinema, yet the bomb still reached its ballroom; Johnson is said to have walked there through the raid when he could not find a taxi, arriving minutes before.
Q 23The first day of the Blitz, 7 September 1940, is remembered by which grim name?
Ultra intelligence warned days ahead that a big raid was coming but never revealed the target, so the choice Winterbotham described was never Churchill's to make.
Q 14In September 1940, Stepney residents demanding better shelters occupied the air-raid shelter of which luxury London hotel?
The Savoy
The Savoy kept an underground shelter for its own guests, so a party of Stepney residents marched in to demand the same protection that their flimsy street shelters could not give.
Q 15What did a household need to put up an Anderson shelter?
A garden
A garden was essential: the shelters came free to poorer households but had to be dug into the ground and heaped with earth, which ruled them out for the many families in crowded industrial districts.
Q 16What were Anderson shelters made from?
Corrugated steel panels
Corrugated steel panels bolted into an arch and heaped with earth shrugged off bomb fragments and debris, but the shelters were so cold and damp that few people could bear long nights in them.
Q 17The Morrison shelter, distributed from 1941, was designed for use where?
Inside the home
Inside the home: the Morrison shelter was a heavy cage that could stand in the living room, where families ate off it as a table by day and crawled inside to sleep at night.
Q 18At its September 1940 peak, roughly how many people slept in London's Underground stations on a single night?
About 180,000
About 180,000 slept on the platforms at the peak, yet a census that November found only 4% of Londoners using Underground stations; most stayed in their own homes or were out on duty.
Q 19What did Underground officials do with station entrances during early Blitz raids, before the government relented?
Locked them
Locked them, on government orders, for fear that shelterers would refuse to come back up; Londoners poured down regardless, and the government gave way and fitted the platforms with bunks.
Q 20What were the huge barrage balloons tethered over British cities during the Blitz designed to do?
Force bombers to fly higher
Force bombers to fly higher: the higher a crew flew, the worse it aimed, and the steel cable anchoring each balloon was strong enough to wreck any aircraft that struck it.
Black Saturday
Black Saturday began at about four in the afternoon, when some 350 bombers set the docks ablaze; the fires then guided a second wave that bombed through the night, and more than 400 people died.
Q 24After Buckingham Palace was bombed in September 1940, Queen Elizabeth said she could now look which part of London in the face?
The East End
The East End and its docks were the main target of the first raids, so the bombs that fell while she and the King were inside the palace let the Queen claim a share of the danger.
Q 25What was later built on the site of the Buckingham Palace chapel destroyed by a bomb?
An art gallery
An art gallery: the Queen's Gallery opened on the ruined chapel's site in 1962, so a bomb that wrecked a private royal chapel ended up opening a corner of the palace to the public to show the royal art collection.
Q 26Which UK shipbuilding city lost hundreds of people in the Easter Tuesday raid of April 1941?
Belfast
Belfast had few shelters and too few firemen for fires burning out of control, so its government turned to the neutral south, and crews from Dublin and other towns drove across the border to help.
Q 27Which storybook codename did Britain give the mass evacuation of city children that began in September 1939?
Operation Pied Piper
Operation Pied Piper moved about a million and a half people, most of them children, within days, under a codename taken from the German legend of a piper who lures a town's children away.
Q 28Which Scottish shipbuilding town had only a handful of its 12,000 homes undamaged after the March 1941 raids?
Clydebank
Clydebank's crowded tenements stood right beside the shipyard and factories the bombers came for, so about 35,000 of its 50,000 or so residents were left homeless.
Q 29Which was the most heavily bombed area of Britain outside London?
Liverpool
Liverpool's docks, Britain's main Atlantic port, were the target: in the first eight days of May 1941 Merseyside was bombed almost every night and 1,900 people were killed.
Q 30What was the SS Malakand carrying when fire spread to it in Huskisson Dock on Merseyside on 3 May 1941?
Munitions
Munitions: about a thousand tons of bombs and shells. Crews fought the fire for hours, but after the all-clear the ship blew up, destroying the whole dock, and the wreck burned for three days.