THE WORLD WAR II QUIZ
(Scroll down for answers)

1. Which dictator dropped out of school at a young age, never held a steady job, served time in prison, lost a wife to suicide, owned few personal possessions, and has been accused of being the antichrist?

2 What two countries refused to sign the Geneva Convention concerning the humane treatment of prisoners of war?

3. What was the largest invasion of the war?

4. Who was “The First Lady of the World”?

5. What type of weapon caused the most combats deaths? 

6. The Soviet Union lost the most citizens, with over 27 million soldiers and civilians killed during the war. Which country lost the second most?

7. How many W.W. II veterans went on to become President of the United States?
a. Eight
b. Six
c. Four
d. Two

8. What forgotten and misplaced weapons from W.W. II continued to kill scores of people in Eastern Europe and North Africa well into the 1980s?

ANSWERS

1. If you said Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin, you are correct. With much in common, they were also beaten by their fathers, lost several siblings at a young age, excelled in History at school, had no previous experience in military leadership, and hated the sight of blood.

2. The Soviet Union and the Empire of Japan refused to sign the 1929 accords on standards of treatment for POWS. Not surprisingly, those two nations had among the worst prisoner survival records of the war. Germans under Soviet captivity had less than a 50% chance of survival. Approximately 90% of Chinese captured by the Japanese would perish during their incarceration, which often involved ceaseless forced labor.     

3. Operation Barbarossa – The Third Reich invasion of the Soviet Union, June 22, 1941. Nearly 4 million German, Romania, Hungarian, and Italian soldiers invaded the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics with 600,000 mechanized vehicles and 625,000 draft animals along a thousand-mile front. It remains the largest military invasion in world history. By comparison, the first Allied wave of Operation Overlord into Normandy on June 6, 1944 involved 150,000 troops over a sixty-mile front. 
 
4. Eleanor Roosevelt. The first wife of a U.S. president to hold press conferences, write syndicated columns, and speak regularly on radio, she also traversed the Atlantic and  Pacific to visit Allied dignitaries and wounded G.I.’s. She also campaigned, unsuccessfully, to increase U.S. entrance quotas for European Jews and to stop wholesale incarceration of Japanese Americans. So angered by her prestige and influence among his own people, Josef Goebbels forbade German papers to write about her. 

5. Artillery. Approximately half of all combat deaths came from field guns, howitzer, mortars, self-propelled guns, and other types of artillery. Automated rifle fire was a distant second.
  
6. China, with approximately 15 million dead, mostly civilian. Germany is next with over six million, followed closely by Poland. Britain and the U.S. lost 13th and 14th most, respectively.

7. a. Eight
Dwight Eisenhower (Army), John F. Kennedy (Navy), Lyndon Johnson (Navy), Richard Nixon (Navy), Gerald Ford (Army), James Carter (Naval Academy), Ronald Reagan (Army captain, assigned to act in war films), and George H.W. Bush (Navy). 

8. Landmines. Strewn across countless fields and roads, from the shores of Honolulu to the Siegfried Line along western Germany, some 600 million mines of varying design and potency seeded the world soil for years after the war. The most evasive of these killers were in regions where, due to haste or loss of records, the planters simply lost track. Among the worst areas were in North Africa, were Germans and British used vast and massive fields to reduce their enemy to a crawl.

SCORE:   7-8       Fighter Ace! Beer and cheese await at the officer’s club.  
                  5-6       Co-pilot. Less glitz, but you still get a cool jacket.         
                  3-4       Ground crew. Overworked and underappreciated.
                  1-2       Mess hall cook. Today’s special – crow.   
                    0        In a pinch, they’ll use you for wheel chucks.