Who's Who? - World War II Trivia Quiz

Answer: Draza Mihailovic

The resistance war in Yugoslavia was ugly in the extreme. The Cetniks not only fought against the Germans, but also against rival resistance organizations and non-Serbian ethnic groups. The various resistance organizations hoped to control Yugoslavia after the war and tried to weaken or eliminate rival groups.

Answer: George Bell, Bishop of Chichester

As the Bishop of Chichester, George Bell sat in the House of Lords, where he criticized the morality of area bombing. It made him very unpopular with Winston Churchill. Sir Stafford Cripps also had doubts and expressed them face-to-face to Arthur Harris and privately to others, too. Two Labour MPs, Richard Stokes and Alfred Salter, spoke in the House of Commons against area bombing.

Answer: Wladyslaw Sikorski

I think most World War II nerds have heard this story. Sikorski was inspecting Polish troops in the Middle East; he left for London via Gibraltar on July 4, 1943. 16 seconds after takeoff his plance crashed in the Straits. His death was a serious setback for the Polish cause. Stalin was the winner because no other Polish leader in London would sway the Allied cause as much as he. Stalin used this to his advantage and annexed a large portion of Poland at the end of the war and installed a Communist régime. Conspiracies theories include suggestions that the Germans or the British or the Soviets or even some combination of them were responsible for his death. Quite a mystery!

Answer: Osami Nagano

Nagano, like Isoroku Yamamoto, attended Harvard around 1913. In the early 1920s, he had a stint as naval attache in Washington, and then attended the London Naval Conference of 1930 as a representitive of the Japanese government. He became Minister of the Navy in 1936, but was then appointed Chief of the Naval General Staff in 1941. By 1944, however, with Japanese defeats all over the map, Hirohito told Tojo he wasn't happy with Nagano. Tojo removed Nagano and replaced him with Shigetaro Shimada.

Answer: He was a senior officer in the Baltic Landwehr

The Baltic Landwehr operated in Latvia. It consisted overwhelmingly of Latvian Germans fighting the Red Army in a campaign that was every bit as vicious as that conducted in Ireland by the Black and Tans. As its website openly admits, the war with the Red Army was fought 'with the utmost brutality on both sides'. How a British WWI general came to be involved with a 'Freikorps' and, what is even more astonishing, hold a high rank in it, is something of a mystery.

After all, it doesn't quite fit the usual image of gentlemanliness.

It's equally strange that ethnic Germans were willing to place such trust in a Briton so soon after WWI.

Answer: Charles Portal

By the standards of the time, this was a remarkably long stint. Churchill was rather inclined to sack commanders.

Answer: Henry Stimson

As important as the position of Secretary of War was, I have never read about him in any history textbook or any of my other three possibilities. At one time, Stimson had been Secretary of War in the Taft Administration, Governor-General of the Phillippines, and Secretary of State under Hoover.

Answer: Robert Oppenheimer

Robert Oppenheimer (1904-67) was the physicist who headed the team that designed the atomic bomb. He said these words soon after the first atomic bomb was tested.

Answer: Giovanni Amendola (1923)

It was first used by Giovanni Amendola in 1923 in a condemnation of the 'all-embracing state' that policized large areas of life normally regarded as private. From the late 1940s onwards the term was used above all to indentify features that Fascist and Communist dictatorships have in common, such as the use of terror and the politicization of as many areas of daily life as possible, including leisure activities.

The traditional claim that Mussolini invented the term is inaccurate.

Answer: Walther von Brauchitsch

Brauchitsch was appointed commander-in-chief of the army following the enforced resignation of Fritsch in 1938 following trumped up allegations of homsexuality. With the sucess of the blitzkrieg attacks on Poland and the West, Brauchitsch was promoted to field marshal in 1940.

However, he fell from favour after failing to capture Moscow in the early winter of 1941. Hitler took over the title "Commander-in-Chief of the German Army", although he led the adminstrative duties to other in the high command.