Round 1: Easy World War 2 trivia to open the night
Start here. These twelve are the questions that get a room talking rather than sulking - dates, names and turning points most players met in school. Read them fast and do not dwell on the ones everybody gets; the point of this round is to get every team on the scoreboard before the difficulty climbs.
One host tip: the question about which country lost the most people reliably starts an argument, because American and British players tend to underestimate how much of this war was fought and suffered in the east. That argument is the most educational thirty seconds of the evening, so let it run.
Q1.Germany invaded which country on 1 September 1939, the date generally taken as the start of World War 2?Tap to reveal
Answer: Poland
Britain and France had guaranteed Poland's borders and declared war two days later, on 3 September - though neither could actually reach Poland to help it.
Q2.Which 1919 treaty ended World War 1 and is usually named among the causes of the second war?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Treaty of Versailles
Its Article 231 assigned Germany responsibility for the war, and the reparations and territorial losses that followed became the grievance the Nazi party campaigned on.
Q3.Which British prime minister announced that Britain was at war with Germany in September 1939?Tap to reveal
Answer: Neville Chamberlain
Chamberlain, the architect of appeasement at Munich a year earlier, made the broadcast - then resigned in May 1940 and handed the job to Winston Churchill.
Q4.Who was president of the United States when Pearl Harbor was attacked in December 1941?Tap to reveal
Answer: Franklin D. Roosevelt
He called 7 December "a date which will live in infamy" and asked Congress for a declaration of war on Japan the next day; it passed with a single dissenting vote.
Q5.Hungary, Japan, Greece, Italy - which of these four was never an Axis country?Tap to reveal
Answer: Greece
Greece ended up on the Allied side because Italy invaded it in October 1940, and the Greek army promptly pushed the Italians back into Albania.
Q6.Which political party did Adolf Hitler lead?Tap to reveal
Answer: The National Socialist German Workers' Party (the Nazi party)
The German name, Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, is where the contraction "Nazi" comes from - it was originally a nickname used by the party's opponents.
Q7.How did Adolf Hitler die on 30 April 1945?Tap to reveal
Answer: He killed himself in his bunker in Berlin
Soviet troops were a few streets away. He had married Eva Braun the day before, and she died with him; Germany surrendered unconditionally a week later.
Q8.What were the nicknames of the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan in August 1945?Tap to reveal
Answer: Little Boy and Fat Man
They were not the same design: Little Boy, used on Hiroshima, was a uranium gun-type bomb, while Fat Man, used on Nagasaki, was the plutonium implosion type tested at Trinity.
Q9.Aboard which American battleship did Japan formally surrender on 2 September 1945?Tap to reveal
Answer: The USS Missouri
The ceremony took place in Tokyo Bay, and the Missouri is still afloat at Pearl Harbor today - moored within sight of the sunken USS Arizona.
Q10.Which international organisation did the Allies create in 1945 to keep the peace after the war?Tap to reveal
Answer: The United Nations
Its charter was signed in San Francisco in June 1945 and came into force that October, replacing the League of Nations, which had failed to stop the war it was built to prevent.
Q11.Which country lost the most people in World War 2?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Soviet Union
Estimates run from about 24 to 27 million Soviet dead, the majority of them civilians. Only China comes close - its losses are put at around 20 million - and no other country is in the same order of magnitude.
Q12.Bulgaria, Finland, Switzerland, Canada - which of these stayed neutral for the whole war?Tap to reveal
Answer: Switzerland
Swiss neutrality was armed neutrality: the country mobilised hundreds of thousands of men and mined its own Alpine tunnels in case Germany came.
Q13.What term is used for the Nazi genocide of roughly six million European Jews?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Holocaust
The word comes from Greek for "sacrifice by fire". Millions of others were murdered alongside the Jewish victims, including Roma, Soviet prisoners of war, Poles, disabled people and political prisoners.
Round 2: Operation codenames and the turning points
Every major move in this war had a codename, and the codenames are what separate the casual player from the reader. This round is built almost entirely on them, which makes it the fairest round in the set: a codename either means something to you or it doesn't, and there is no half credit to argue about.
If you are hosting for a mixed-knowledge room, offer the year as a free hint on the harder ones. A date narrows the possibilities from 'anywhere in Europe' to a single front and a single year, which is usually enough for a good guesser to reason their way to the answer.
Q1.What was the German codename for the 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union?Tap to reveal
Answer: Operation Barbarossa
It was named after Frederick Barbarossa, a medieval Holy Roman emperor, and launched on 22 June 1941 along a front stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea.
Q2.What was the codename for the Allied invasion of Normandy in June 1944?Tap to reveal
Answer: Operation Overlord
Overlord was the whole campaign for north-west France; the landings themselves on 6 June were Operation Neptune, the naval component.
Q3.How many landing beaches were used in the Normandy landings?Tap to reveal
Answer: Five
Utah and Omaha were the American beaches, Gold and Sword the British, and Juno the Canadian. Omaha was the bloodiest by a wide margin.
Q4.What does the "D" in D-Day stand for?Tap to reveal
Answer: Day
It is ordinary military planning shorthand - the unnamed day an operation begins, with following days written D+1, D+2 and so on. Every operation had a D-Day; only one is remembered.
Q5.The 1940 evacuation of British and French troops from Dunkirk was codenamed what?Tap to reveal
Answer: Operation Dynamo
Around 338,000 men were lifted off the beaches in nine days by a fleet that included fishing boats and pleasure craft - though nearly all the army's heavy equipment was left behind.
Q6.Which November 1942 operation, commanded by Dwight Eisenhower, landed Allied troops in Morocco and Algeria?Tap to reveal
Answer: Operation Torch
It was Eisenhower's first command of a major operation, and it was deliberately made to look American because the Allies expected Vichy French troops to resist the British more fiercely.
Q7.What was the target of Operation Husky in July 1943?Tap to reveal
Answer: Sicily
The invasion knocked Mussolini out of power within weeks - the Italian king had him arrested on 25 July, while the fighting on Sicily still had three weeks to run - and it opened the long, grinding campaign up the Italian mainland.
Q8.What was Operation Sea Lion meant to achieve?Tap to reveal
Answer: The German invasion of Britain
It depended on the Luftwaffe winning air superiority first. When the Battle of Britain denied it, the invasion was postponed indefinitely and never revived.
Q9.Which two countries did Germany invade in Operation Weserubung in April 1940?Tap to reveal
Answer: Denmark and Norway
Denmark was overrun in a single day. Norway held out for two months with British, French and Polish help, largely because Germany needed its ports and its route for Swedish iron ore.
Q10.What was the codename for the planned Allied invasion of the Japanese home islands that never happened?Tap to reveal
Answer: Operation Downfall
It had two parts - Olympic against Kyushu, then Coronet against Honshu - and the projected casualty figures for both sides are still central to the argument over the atomic bombs.
Q11.The quiet stretch from September 1939 to spring 1940, when the powers had declared war but barely fought, is known by what name in English?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Phony War
The Germans called it Sitzkrieg, the "sitting war", a joke on Blitzkrieg; the French called it the drole de guerre. It ended abruptly when Germany moved west in April and May 1940.
Q12.Which 1945 conference brought Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin together to settle the defeat of Germany and the shape of postwar Europe?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Yalta Conference
It ran for a week in February 1945 in Crimea. Roosevelt was visibly failing and died two months later, which is one reason the Yalta bargains were so quickly contested.
Q13.Which 1943 battle on the Eastern Front is generally described as the largest tank battle in history?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Battle of Kursk
Germany's attack was so heavily telegraphed that the Soviets had months to dig in. The Red Army could replace its enormous losses afterwards; the Wehrmacht could not, and after Kursk it spent almost the whole Eastern Front war retreating, with just one large offensive left in it - at Lake Balaton in Hungary in March 1945.
Round 3: The war in the Pacific
Most quiz sets treat the Pacific as Pearl Harbor plus two atomic bombs. This round is the correction: a naval war fought over distances that dwarf the European theatre, decided largely by aircraft carriers and by which side could replace trained pilots.
This is the round where a knowledgeable team pulls ahead, so it is worth putting late in the night. If nobody in the room is a Pacific reader, read the questions in the order printed - they run roughly chronologically from 1942 to 1945, and the sequence itself gives players something to reason from.
Q1.Which 1942 battle is generally called the turning point of the Pacific war?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Battle of Midway
Japan lost four fleet carriers in a single day, along with about 3,000 men - among them the flight-deck crews and mechanics who kept the carriers working, harder to replace than the pilots and much harder to replace than the aircraft. Japan never regained the initiative in the central Pacific.
Q2.In which sea was the first naval battle in history where the opposing ships never sighted each other?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Coral Sea
Fought in May 1942 entirely by carrier aircraft. It was a tactical draw, but it stopped the Japanese advance on Port Moresby and cost Japan two carriers it needed a month later at Midway.
Q3.Where did American and Japanese forces fight for roughly six months in 1942 and 1943 before Japan evacuated the island?Tap to reveal
Answer: Guadalcanal
It was the first American offensive of the Pacific war, and it became a grinding contest of supply and disease as much as combat - the surrounding waters were nicknamed Ironbottom Sound for the ships sunk there.
Q4.In 1942 Japan captured a British colonial city considered so well fortified as to be immune to attack. Which city?Tap to reveal
Answer: Singapore
Its guns faced the sea; the Japanese came overland down the Malay Peninsula, partly by bicycle. Churchill later wrote that it was 'the worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history.'
Q5.In which sea were the combined American, British, Dutch and Australian naval forces decisively beaten in 1942?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Java Sea
The four navies had never trained together, had no common signal code and no air cover. The defeat opened the Dutch East Indies and its oilfields to Japan.
Q6.When the Doolittle raiders bombed Japan in 1942, Roosevelt jokingly told reporters the bombers had come from where?Tap to reveal
Answer: Shangri-La
The mythical valley from the 1933 novel Lost Horizon. The real launch point was the carrier USS Hornet - and the navy later named a carrier USS Shangri-La in tribute to the joke.
Q7.Japanese kamikaze attacks first appeared in an organised way in late 1944 during the fighting near which country?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Philippines
By then Japan had lost most of its trained carrier pilots, so the special attack units were built around aircraft and volunteers rather than the skill neither could be replaced with.
Q8.On which Pacific island was the famous 1945 photograph of American servicemen raising a flag taken?Tap to reveal
Answer: Iwo Jima
Joe Rosenthal shot it on Mount Suribachi during a battle that had a month still to run. It was a second, larger flag - and the Marine Corps has twice revised who the men in the frame actually were.
Q9.Which island captured in 1944 became the air base from which the atomic bomb missions took off?Tap to reveal
Answer: Tinian
Its North Field was built out to handle B-29s flying round trips to Japan, and for a stretch it was one of the busiest airfields on earth.
Q10.Which Japanese city lost a huge section of itself to a firestorm started by a B-29 raid in March 1945?Tap to reveal
Answer: Tokyo
The low-level incendiary raid on the night of 9-10 March burned out a dense wooden district near the Sumida River and is thought to have killed on the order of the Hiroshima bomb.
Q11.Which 1945 battle was the last major battle of the Pacific war and the costliest in the Pacific for American forces?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Battle of Okinawa
Some 12,520 Americans were killed or went missing, along with roughly 110,000 Japanese and conscripted Okinawan defenders and somewhere between a quarter and a third of Okinawa's civilian population - the projection that made an invasion of the home islands look unbearable.
Q12.In which sea did American naval aviators destroy Japanese carrier air power in a 1944 battle nicknamed "the turkey shoot"?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Philippine Sea
Japan lost three carriers and hundreds of aircraft in two days. After it, Japanese carriers were mostly decoys - which is exactly how they were used at Leyte Gulf months later.
Q13.Which Japanese word, meaning "way of the warrior", described the code of conduct expected of Japanese soldiers?Tap to reveal
Answer: Bushido
A samurai-era code revived and reshaped by the modern Japanese state, which is part of why surrender carried such disgrace and why Allied troops so rarely took prisoners in the island fighting.
Round 4: Commanders, tanks and warplanes
Who was in charge, and what they fought with. Pairing the two in one round works better than it sounds, because the hardware questions give the mechanically minded players a way back into a round that would otherwise belong to the readers of biographies.
The nickname questions here are the best value for a host: 'Desert Fox', 'Stalin's Organ', 'Chicago Typewriter' and 'Schmeisser' all have a story attached, and one of the four is a famous misattribution - a weapon Allied troops named after a designer who had almost nothing to do with it. Read the fact notes out; they are better than the answers.
Q1.Which German general was nicknamed the Desert Fox?Tap to reveal
Answer: Erwin Rommel
He earned it commanding the Afrika Korps. In 1944 he was implicated in the July plot against Hitler and given the choice of a quiet suicide or a show trial that would have taken his family with him.
Q2.Which Japanese vice admiral commanded the carrier force that attacked Pearl Harbor?Tap to reveal
Answer: Chuichi Nagumo
He chose not to launch a third wave against Pearl Harbor's fuel tanks and repair shops - a decision much argued over, since those facilities let the Pacific Fleet keep operating from Hawaii.
Q3.Which German field marshal commanded the Sixth Army at Stalingrad and surrendered it to the Soviets?Tap to reveal
Answer: Friedrich Paulus
Hitler promoted him to field marshal on 30 January, the day before the surrender, on the reasoning that no German field marshal had ever surrendered. Paulus surrendered anyway, and later broadcast against Hitler from Soviet captivity.
Q4.Which German commander, a former air force officer, held up the Allied advance through Italy for nearly two years?Tap to reveal
Answer: Albert Kesselring
He turned the Italian peninsula's mountains and rivers into a series of defensive lines - Gustav, then Gothic - each of which had to be broken at heavy cost.
Q5.Which French general's armoured division took the German surrender of Paris in August 1944?Tap to reveal
Answer: Philippe Leclerc
Eisenhower had planned to bypass Paris, but the city rose against its garrison and de Gaulle insisted a French division lead the entry. Leclerc's 2nd Armoured did.
Q6.Who led the Vichy regime that governed unoccupied France after the 1940 surrender?Tap to reveal
Answer: Marshal Philippe Petain
A national hero of the First World War for the defence of Verdun; after the second he was convicted of treason, and his death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.
Q7.Which American submachine gun was nicknamed the "Chicago Typewriter"?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Thompson
The nickname came from Prohibition-era gangsters and the police who chased them, both of whom used it before the army did. Soldiers just called it the Tommy gun.
Q8.Which German submachine gun was widely and wrongly nicknamed the "Schmeisser" by Allied troops?Tap to reveal
Answer: The MP 40
Hugo Schmeisser had nothing to do with designing it - the credit belongs to Heinrich Vollmer and the Erma works. Allied intelligence attached the famous name and it stuck for eighty years.
Q9.What was the first jet-powered fighter aircraft to see combat?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Messerschmitt Me 262
It entered service in 1944, far faster than anything the Allies could put against it, and far too late and too few to change anything - it spent much of its life vulnerable on takeoff and landing.
Q10.What was the name of the first long-range ballistic missile used in warfare?Tap to reveal
Answer: The V-2
It flew too high and too fast to intercept, and there was no warning before it landed. London was the most famous target, but the port of Antwerp was hit relentlessly too.
Q11.Which Soviet rocket launcher did German troops nickname "Stalin's Organ"?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Katyusha
The name came from the rack of launch rails, which looked like organ pipes, and the shriek of the rockets. Soviet crews used the gentler nickname Katyusha, from a popular wartime song.
Q12.Which Soviet medium tank, first built in 1940, was the mainstay of the Red Army for the whole war?Tap to reveal
Answer: The T-34
Its edge was not any single feature but the combination - sloped armour, a big gun, wide tracks for mud and snow - in a design simple enough to build by the tens of thousands.
Q13.Which German battleship left harbour in May 1941 to raid Atlantic shipping and was sunk on her first operational voyage?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Bismarck
She sank HMS Hood in minutes, then lost her steering to an air-launched torpedo and was hunted down days later. Britain committed much of its fleet to the chase.
Round 5: The American home front
This is the round almost no other World War 2 trivia set bothers with, and it is usually the one players talk about afterwards - because it is the part of the war their own grandparents actually lived. It covers what was in short supply at home, how the war was paid for, what the posters asked of ordinary people, and the jobs that opened up because the men were gone.
It also contains the question worth ending on. The last few are not comfortable answers to read aloud, but they belong in any honest set about this war, and the notes attached to them give a host somewhere to go next.
Q1.Besides money, what did an American need in order to buy a scarce product like gasoline during the war?Tap to reveal
Answer: A ration coupon for that product
Households were issued ration books, and when the coupons for a product ran out you waited for the next book or went to the black market. Sugar, coffee, meat, butter, tyres and shoes were all rationed at some point.
Q2.Athletes, film stars and other celebrities toured the United States during the war urging Americans to do what?Tap to reveal
Answer: Buy war bonds
Taxes alone could not cover the war, so the government borrowed from the public on an enormous scale - tens of billions of dollars, bought by a large share of all American households.
Q3.Which slogan appeared on the wartime poster that became the image of Rosie the Riveter?Tap to reveal
Answer: "We Can Do It!"
It was an internal Westinghouse morale poster displayed for about two weeks in 1943, and it was almost unknown at the time. It only became the icon of wartime women's work when it was rediscovered decades later.
Q4.Members of which group were held in large numbers in American internment camps during the war, despite most of them being US citizens?Tap to reveal
Answer: Japanese Americans
Roughly 120,000 people were removed from the West Coast under Executive Order 9066, about two thirds of them citizens by birth. Congress formally apologised and authorised reparations in 1988.
Q5.American children pulled wagons door to door through their neighbourhoods during the war, collecting what for the salvage drives?Tap to reveal
Answer: Scrap metal, rubber, paper and similar salvageable material
The salvage was genuinely useful, but the drives were also deliberate morale work: a child hauling a wagon of tin cans down the street felt part of something their father was away doing.
Q6.Booming defence industries and a labour shortage opened substantial new job opportunities for which two groups?Tap to reveal
Answer: Women and African Americans
Both were largely pushed back out of those jobs after the war, but the precedent held - the 1941 order banning discrimination in defence hiring is a direct ancestor of later civil rights legislation.
Q7.Which Christmas song, first sung by Bing Crosby, topped the charts and became a favourite of American troops overseas?Tap to reveal
Answer: "White Christmas"
Irving Berlin wrote it and Crosby introduced it in the 1942 film Holiday Inn. A song about missing home landed differently on men who were not going to get there, and it became one of the best-selling records ever made.
Q8.Before Pearl Harbor, while the United States was still officially neutral, what did the US Navy begin doing for British merchant ships crossing the Atlantic?Tap to reveal
Answer: Escorting their convoys part of the way across
Roosevelt had to move carefully around strong isolationist opinion, so the navy escorted cargo ships part of the way across and reported U-boat positions to the Royal Navy. American ships were sunk doing it, months before any declaration of war.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I play this World War 2 trivia quiz online?
Yes - the questions on this page run as a playable quiz widget, and the Trivio.NET app has history packs with daily quizzes and real-time 1v1 battles if you want to play against someone.
How many World War 2 trivia questions are on this page?
60, split into five rounds: the basics, operation codenames and turning points, the Pacific war, commanders and hardware, and the American home front. Each one comes with a fact note.
Are these World War 2 trivia questions suitable for a classroom?
Yes. The set is written for middle school and up, the harder rounds are clearly marked, and every answer has a one-line note a teacher can open out into a longer explanation.
What is a good order to run the rounds in for a quiz night?
Run them as printed. Round 1 gets everyone on the board, rounds 2 and 3 separate the field, round 4 lets the hardware people catch up, and round 5 is the one people talk about afterwards.
Which round is the hardest?
Round 3, the Pacific war. Most players know Pearl Harbor and the atomic bombs and very little of the three and a half years in between, so the 1942 carrier battles and the island-hopping campaign are where teams start losing points.
Why does the set leave out some well-known World War 2 facts?
Because several of them turned out not to be facts. The Marine Corps has twice, in June 2016 and October 2019, officially corrected who the men in its most famous photograph were, so where a detail has been revised we wrote the question around the part that has not.
