World War II Quiz

The Battle of Okinawa (April 1 — June 22, 1945) was the final massive clash between the United States and the Imperial Japanese Army. While some of the other choices happened later, they were merely skirmishes.

Six. Yellow for Jewish inmates, Red for political prisoners, Green for habitual criminals, Purple for Jehovah’s Witnesses and religious pacifists, Black for those deemed asocial, Pink for homosexual men, and Blue for foreign forced laborers.

Lisbon, Portugal was widely known as the “Capital of Espionage” or the “Nest of Spies”. Because Portugal remained strictly neutral throughout the war, it was a rare haven where Allied and Axis intelligence agents could operate openly, brush shoulders in the same hotels, and trade information.

Dachau opened on March 22, 1933, less than two months after Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany. The camp was constructed on the grounds of an abandoned World War I munitions factory located about 10 miles northwest of Munich.

Mount Suribachi is the extinct volcano at the southern tip of Iwo Jima, taken by US Marines on 23 February 1945 and the site of the flag raising photographed by Joe Rosenthal. Guadalcanal and Tulagi were fought over in 1942, Okinawa from April 1945.

The 6-month long Battle of Stalingrad resulted in an estimated 1.8 million to 2 million total casualties (killed, wounded, captured, or missing) across both sides.

In 1931, the Mukden Incident led to the Japanese invasion and occupation of Manchuria. When the US and UK began sanctions for natural resources required by Japan, they felt forced to attack.

(Grand Admiral) Karl Dönitz, the Supreme Commander of the German Navy, lost his youngest son, Peter Dönitz, when U-954 was sunk in the North Atlantic.

Located at the southernmost tip of Okinawa, at the “Suicide Cliffs,” it commemorates the thousands of fleeing citizens who jumped into the rocky ocean below to escape American soldiers.

Members of the Veterans’ Guard of Canada had the unusual role of escorting shiploads of mules which were needed to pack essential food, weapons, and ammunition right up to the front lines

Spanish spy Juan Pujol García worked an entirely fictional network of 27 sub-agents supposedly operating across Britain and also organized the deception campaign for the 1944 Normandy landings. His codename was GARBO, named after the actress Greta Garbo because he was “the greatest actor in the world.”

Unternehmen Wacht am Rhein — “Watch on the Rhine” — was the cover name for the Ardennes offensive of December 1944, chosen because it sounded defensive. The other three are real German operations from other campaigns: Fall Weiß was the invasion of Poland, Weserübung the invasion of Denmark and Norway, and Seelöwe the abandoned plan to invade Britain.

Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 7 became an ultimate symbol of psychological defiance on August 9, 1942, when the piece was performed live in besieged Leningrad under the most extreme circumstances:

Heinrich Himmler ordered soldiers in training for the Einsatzgruppen to view the notorious anti-Semitic propaganda movie Jud Süss (Jew Suss).

Punctually every single night at 9:57 PM, Radio Belgrade played “Lili Marleen” as its sign-off track.

Tokyo Rose coined the phrase as serious psychological warfare meant to demoralize American soldiers. After the war, she was prosecuted for treason in the United States and eventually granted a full presidential pardon in 1977.

Bletchley Park was the main decryption center for the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS), where Ultra intelligence was produced.

Virginia Hall lost her lower left leg in a pre-war hunting accident (naming her prosthesis “Cuthbert”) and became an incredibly elusive agent for the SOE and later the OSS. She once radioed London to report that “Cuthbert” was causing her trouble, headquarters famously replied: “If Cuthbert is troublesome, have him eliminated.”

When Soviet forces stormed central Berlin and captured the Reich Chancellery grounds in May 1945, intelligence officers didn’t have to break down secret false walls or dive into rivers to find out how the bunker was built. Russian engineers and SMERSH agents literally walked into the abandoned, subterranean offices of the Reich Chancellery’s chief architect and found the complete, highly detailed structural blueprints sitting inside a standard, unlocked metal filing cabinet.

Operation Haudegen, a German meteorological station on Nordaustlandet in Svalbard, ran from 9 September 1944 to 4 September 1945. It lost radio contact in May 1945 and the men could only call for help in August; a Norwegian seal-hunting vessel took them off in early September, and they surrendered to its captain.