World War 2
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147 free World War 2 trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
88 free World War 2 trivia questions with answers. These WWII trivia questions cover the whole war, not just D-Day and Pearl Harbor. Eighty-eight questions run from the invasion of Poland in 1939 through Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain, Stalingrad, Midway, El Alamein, Normandy, the Bulge, Iwo Jima and Okinawa to the surrenders of 1945, with stops at the home front, rationing, the codebreakers of Bletchley Park, the Manhattan Project and the leaders on every side. The set is built for pub quizzes, classrooms and anyone who reads a lot of history: about a third of the questions are ones most people know, a third need real recall, and the rest will separate the buffs from the casuals. Every answer has been checked against a primary source or an encyclopaedia entry, so the dates, names and numbers here are ones you can argue with confidence.
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Q 01Operation Weserübung, launched on 9 April 1940, was the German invasion of which two countries?
Denmark and Norway
Denmark and Norway were invaded on 9 April 1940 to secure Germany's supply of Swedish iron ore, shipped through the port of Narvik; Denmark gave in within hours, while Norway held out until June.
Q 02Which of these was one of the "Big Four" Allied powers of World War II?
China
China was the fourth of Roosevelt's 'Four Policemen', the powers he wanted to enforce the post-war peace, which is how it gained a permanent seat on the UN Security Council.
Q 03Which country did German troops march into on 12 March 1938, in the union known as the Anschluss?
Austria
Austria's Chancellor Schuschnigg, browbeaten by Hitler at Berchtesgaden a month earlier, had called a vote on independence for 13 March; the invasion came the day before it.
Q 04Which October 1944 engagement is often called the largest naval battle of World War II?
Battle of Leyte Gulf
The Battle of Leyte Gulf nearly went wrong for the US: a decoy carrier force lured Admiral Halsey's fleet north, leaving the invasion shipping guarded only by escort carriers and destroyers.
Q 05Which Eastern Front clash of massive urban fighting is often called the turning point against Nazi Germany?
Battle of Stalingrad
The Battle of Stalingrad ended after Hitler promoted the trapped Friedrich Paulus to field marshal, expecting him to die fighting; Paulus surrendered instead, along with some 91,000 men.
Q 06Which German dive bomber, notorious for its screaming sirens, spearheaded the September 1939 invasion of Poland?
Stuka
Stuka is short for Sturzkampfflugzeug, German for 'dive bomber'; the Junkers Ju 87's howl in a dive was no accident but came from sirens fitted to terrify people on the ground.
Q 07Who served as Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe on D-Day?
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Dwight D. Eisenhower put the invasion back a day for bad weather, then pencilled a note for release if it failed: 'If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.'
Q 08What was the code name for the Allied invasion of Normandy that began on D-Day in June 1944?
Operation Overlord
Operation Overlord was shielded by an elaborate deception: fake equipment, a phantom army and bogus radio traffic persuaded Germany that the main landing would come at the Pas-de-Calais.
Q 09Which August 1939 pact secretly divided Eastern Europe between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union?
Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact
The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, named for the foreign ministers who signed it, promised ten years of peace while a secret protocol carved up Eastern Europe; Hitler broke it in under two years.
Q 10Midway, in June 1942, came one month after which earlier carrier-versus-carrier engagement?
Battle of the Coral Sea
The Battle of the Coral Sea was fought entirely by carrier aircraft, the two fleets never sighting each other, and it left two Japanese carriers unfit to fight at Midway a month later.
Q 11Which Prime Minister led Britain into the war in September 1939 and resigned in May 1940?
Neville Chamberlain
Neville Chamberlain announced the declaration of war by radio on 3 September 1939 and resigned on 10 May 1940, the day Germany struck in the west, after his Commons majority collapsed.
Q 12Which event of November 1938 saw Nazi mobs smash Jewish shops and burn synagogues across Germany?
Kristallnacht
Kristallnacht left the streets littered with broken glass; the regime staged it to look like spontaneous public anger, then fined Germany's Jews a billion marks.
Q 13Who became US president in April 1945 and went on to authorise the atomic bombings of Japan?
Harry S. Truman
Q 21The Soviet invasion of which country on 30 November 1939 began the Winter War?
Finland
Finland held off a far larger Red Army for more than three months before signing the Moscow Peace Treaty in March 1940 and giving up the Karelian Isthmus.
Q 22Which American bomber dropped the first atomic bomb used in war, in August 1945?
Enola Gay
Enola Gay was named by pilot Paul Tibbets after his mother, only hours before take-off; three days later the same plane flew as weather scout for the second atomic mission.
Q 23Which signal reported that the Pearl Harbor attack had achieved surprise?
Tora! Tora! Tora!
'Tora! Tora! Tora!' was sent by the raid's air commander, Mitsuo Fuchida, who became a Christian after the war and toured the United States as an evangelist.
Harry S. Truman had been vice president for less than three months and had never been told about the atomic bomb project until after he was sworn in as president.
Q 14Which country stayed out of the war yet sent the 'Blue Division' to fight for Germany in Russia?
Spain
Spain's dictator Franco had won his civil war with German and Italian help; he sent tens of thousands of volunteers to the Eastern Front while keeping his country officially out of the war.
Q 15Pearl Harbor, attacked by Japan in December 1941, lies on which Hawaiian island?
Oahu
Oahu's radar operators spotted the incoming planes nearly an hour before the attack, but the report was waved away as a flight of American B-17 bombers expected that morning.
Q 16Which city was the main target of the Blitz, Germany's sustained bombing campaign of 1940–41?
London
London was bombed from September 1940 to May 1941, and thousands of its people slept each night on the platforms of Underground stations.
Q 17The post-war trials of Nazi war criminals were held at the Palace of Justice in which city?
Nuremberg
Nuremberg's Palace of Justice was chosen partly because it was relatively intact and had an attached prison, though the tribunal's permanent seat was Berlin.
Q 18What was the name of the largest Nazi concentration and extermination camp?
Auschwitz
Auschwitz was a complex of more than 40 camps where about 1.1 million people were murdered; Soviet troops freed the 7,000 prisoners left behind on 27 January 1945, now Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Q 19Who was the Emperor of Japan during World War II?
Hirohito
Hirohito announced the surrender in a radio broadcast on 15 August 1945, reportedly the first time ordinary Japanese had ever heard their emperor's voice.
Q 20Which English city lost its medieval cathedral in the German raid code-named 'Moonlight Sonata' in November 1940?
Coventry
Coventry was hit on the night of 14 November 1940 in a raid aimed at its factories; the roofless shell of its old cathedral still stands beside the new one built after the war.
Q 24Which German field marshal earned the nickname 'Desert Fox' for his command of German and Italian forces in North Africa?
Erwin Rommel
Erwin Rommel, the Desert Fox, was later implicated in the July 1944 plot against Hitler and chose to take cyanide rather than face a public trial that could have endangered his family.
Q 25Which British codebreaker devised the Bombe, a machine for finding each day's German cipher settings?
Alan Turing
Alan Turing's Bombe built on the 'bomba' of Polish codebreakers, among them Marian Rejewski, who had first reconstructed the German military cipher machine back in 1932.
Q 26The February 1945 Yalta Conference took place on which peninsula?
Crimea
Crimea's resort of Yalta was Stalin's choice: he insisted his doctors had barred him from long journeys, so Roosevelt and Churchill had to make the trip to him.
Q 27What was the codename for Nazi Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941?
Operation Barbarossa
Operation Barbarossa, named after a medieval German emperor, tore up the non-aggression pact that Hitler had signed with Moscow less than two years earlier.
Q 28In his first Commons speech as Prime Minister, Churchill offered Britain nothing but 'blood, toil, tears and' what?
Sweat
Sweat ended the line Churchill delivered on 13 May 1940, three days after taking office; asked what his aim was, he answered in the same speech: 'victory at all costs'.
Q 29Which July-August 1945 conference brought the 'Big Three' together over defeated Germany and the post-war order?
Potsdam
The Potsdam Conference ran from 17 July to 2 August 1945 at the Cecilienhof palace; Churchill was replaced mid-conference by Clement Attlee after losing the British general election.
Q 30Which term names the German tactic of fast armoured thrusts backed by close air support?
Blitzkrieg
Blitzkrieg means 'lightning war'; for all its fame, the German army never officially adopted the word as a military doctrine.