Veterans Day Trivia Quiz – Twenty Quiz Questions with Answers

Well, this was a pretty quiet Veterans Day.  I didn’t go anywhere or celebrate in any particular way, but it sounds like an excuse to put up an article consisting of about twenty quiz questions involving Veterans Day and or military and war trivia questions and the like. 

I find military trivia quite interesting. I guess it’s a guy thing, war, army, fighter planes, tanks, bombs, and things of that nature are tied in somehow with testosterone.  I enjoy history too, and what else is trivia but historical facts!

I am a veteran of the Vietnam War myself by the way.  Thank you to all the rest of you fellow Veterans and you guys on active duty too. Those of you overseas, come home safe please.

You can copy and paste these military, wars, and battles trivia questions into your word processor, delete the answers, and print out the questions in your preferred format and presto… you’ve got a nice icebreaker for a party or other get together.

Ok, without further ado here is my Veterans Day Trivia Quiz!

1. How long did the Arab-Israeli War of 1967 last?
 A: Six days.

2. Where was the Bay of Pigs whose invasion sparked a world crisis in the 60s?
 A: Cuba.

3. Which major weapon of war was used for the first time in 1916?
 A: Tank.

4. What Operation was the codename for the D Day landings?
 A: Overlord

5. What marked the first time since the Revolution that the U.S. accepted direct financial aid to fight a war?
 A:   The Persian Gulf War.

6. What Civil War general graduated first in the West Point class of 1829?
 A:  Robert E. Lee

7. What opportunistic country declared war on Japan five days before its surrender in 1945?
 A: The Soviet Union.

8. What so called "war" spawned the dueling slogans "Better Dead Than Red" and "Better Red Than Dead" in the 1950s?
 A: The Cold War.

9. How were the height and width of modern American battleships originally determined?
 A: The ships had to be able to go beneath the Brooklyn Bridge and through the Panama Canal.

10. What was the name of the Japanese destroyer that sank PT-109, commanded by Lt. John F. Kennedy, on August 2, 1943?
 A: Amigiri.

11. How many times did the nuclear submarine USS Triton surface during its historic 1960 underwater circumnavigation of the globe?
 A: Twice--once to remove a sick crew member, and once to pay tribute to  Ferdinand Magellan on the island of Mactan in the Philippines, where the explorer was killed in 1521 during his circumnavigation of the globe.

12. What great military leader was an accomplished yo-yo player?
 A: Napoleon's nemesis, the Duke of Wellington. At the time, the yo-yo was known as a bandalore.

13. Who was the youngest U.S. Army officer ever to be promoted to general?
 A: George Custer, a graduate of West Point, who became a general at age 23--14 years before his infamous battle of Little Big Horn.

14. What was the inspiration for the name Rough Riders--the name of the elite fighting unit Theodore Roosevelt organized for the Spanish-American War?
 A: The Rough Riders Hotel in Medora, North Dakota, where Roosevelt had tried ranching.

15. What American actor was given the British Distinguished Service Cross for commanding a flotilla of raiding craft for Admiral Louis Mountbatten's commandos during World War II?
 A: Douglas Fairbanks Jr.

16. Who was the first American congressman to don a uniform following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941?
 A: President-to-be Lyndon Johnson, who served in the Navy

17. What actor has attained the highest U.S. military rank in history for an entertainer?
 A: James Stewart, who rose to the rank of a brigadier general in the U.S. Air Force Reserve.

18. You may remember the Alamo, but do you now what the word means in Spanish?
 A: Cottonwood.

19. Why did U.S. secret agents abandon plans--approved by President Franklin D. Roosevelt--to drop live bats from airplanes to frighten the Japanese during World War II?
 A: The bats froze at high altitudes, before they could be released.

20. What American military leader said, "Lafayette we are here," and on what occasion?
 A: Gen. Black Jack Pershing, arriving in France in 1917 after the U.S. entered WWI.