Question 1. Just under 1.5 million southerners, most of them African Americans, left the segregated South during World War II, despite the fact that jobs were available in southern defense industries.
Select one:
a. True
b. False
Question 2. In June 1942, American forces halted Japan's advance at the Battle of
Select one:
a. the Coral Sea.
b. Iwo Jima.
c. Midway.
d. the Bulge.
e. the Philippines.
Question 3. Operation Overlord - the official name for the D-Day landing in Normandy - involved ____ Allied soldiers.
Select one:
a. 1 million
b. 500,000
c. 10 million
d. 100,000
e. 3 million
Question 4. In 1940, the United States experienced its first
Select one:
a. attempted attack from another country on American soil, in the state of Oregon.
b. attack by a German submarine on an American merchant ship.
c. request for military assistance from another country: Britain.
d. debate in Congress as to whether the United States should enter the new European war.
e. peacetime draft.
Question 5. The decisive military turning point for the United States and the Allies against Japan in the Pacific occurred in 1943 with the Allied offensive at the Battle of
Select one:
a. Manila Bay
b. Guam
c. Midway Island
d. Guadalcanal
e. Coral Sea
Question 6. American troops fought their first battles of the war in 1942 in the Pacific, where they were soundly defeated in each one.
Select one:
a. False
b. True
Question 7. Hitler's and Stalin's nonaggression pact involved which of these countries?
Select one:
a. England.
b. France.
c. Sweden.
d. United States.
e. Poland.
Question 8. Japan's first major action in the Pacific took place when its military invaded
Select one:
a. Manchuria in China.
b. Russian Siberia.
c. the Dutch East Indies.
d. the Philippines.
e. Iwo Jima.
Question 9. This is a freebie question -- either answer is right
Select one:
a. False
b. True
Question 10. Which of the following was not one of Roosevelt's Four Freedoms?
Select one:
a. Freedom from Fear
b. Freedom of Speech
c. Freedom of Religion
d. Freedom from Want
e. Freedom of Assembly
Question 11. Which event set the stage of American involvement in the war?
Select one:
a. The bombing of London in the Battle of Britain
b. All of these choices.
c. Increased U.S. awareness of the Holocaust
d. The installation of the pro-German government installed in Vichy, France
e. The invasion of Poland
Question 12. The Battle of the Bulge was Germany's last desperate attempt to capture Allied strongholds in Belgium and win the war.
Select one:
a. True
b. False
Question 13. Historians regard the Great Depression as probably the greatest factor in causing World War II because
Select one:
a. Americans fared so much better than Europeans, leading to anger and in-fighting.
b. None of these choices.
c. Facing dwindling resources of its own, Germany hoped to improve its economy by annexing other countries.
d. All of these choices.
e. It led American businesses to reduce investments in Germany, which decreased that nation's production and its ability to repay its World War I reparations.
Question 14. The Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944 (the GI Bill) provided
Select one:
a. low-interest housing loans.
b. some unemployment benefits for veterans.
c. medical care for veterans.
d. financial aid for education.
e. All of these choices.
Question 15. Which of these aggressive acts of political defiance did Hitler commit in Europe in 1936?
Select one:
a. Hitler invaded Poland.
b. Hitler occupied the Rhineland.
c. Hitler seized Czechoslovakia.
d. Hitler annexed German-speaking Austria.
Question 16. In May 1940, Winston Churchill
Select one:
a. petitioned the U.S. Congress for military aid.
b. became Britain's Prime Minister and wrote to FDR.
c. became Britain's Secretary of the Navy.
d. delivered his inspiring speech to the British Parliament in which he pledged that the British would continue to fight the Germans anywhere.
e. met with FDR for the first of many meetings.
Question 17. The Zoot Suit Riots occurred between Mexican and American youths in the city of Brownsville, Texas.
Select one:
a. True
b. False
Question 18. The most famous spokesman of the "America First Committee" was Harry Truman.
Select one:
a. False
b. True
Question 19. From the spring of 1940 until the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, President Roosevelt and the U.S government
Select one:
a. adopted a policy of strict neutrality that prohibited selling armaments and providing any military assistance to Great Britain.
b. continued to believe that Americans could maintain complete neutrality and still sell to the Allies and the Axis powers.
c. organized the manufacturing, transfer, and transportation of war materials and American defense bases to assist Great Britain and prepare for likely war against Nazi Germany.
d. concentrated on providing massive military assistance to China and beefing up the defenses of American islands in the Pacific to prevent Japan from achieving territorial and geo-political gains in Asia and the Pacific.
e. refused to get caught up in the drama overseas.
Question 20. Executive Order 8802 established
Select one:
a. desegregation in the armed forces.
b. the bracero program, which brought Mexican migrant workers to America to fill acute labor needs.
c. price controls under the oversight of the Office of Price Administration.
d. anti-discriminatory hiring practices in industries that had government defense contracts.
e. fair working conditions for women in the defense industries.
Question 21. One of the major social and economic changes resulting from the war was that by 1945 female employment outside the home had increased by more than 50 percent, to 20 million.
Select one:
a. False
b. True
Question 22. The "Double V" campaign was a commitment made by African American military personnel fighting in the war; they would achieve victory abroad and then come home to work for victory over discrimination against African Americans in their own country.
Select one:
a. False
b. True
Question 23. The task of the War Relocation Authority was to
Select one:
a. oversee the forced internment of Japanese-Americans, including American citizens, in various camps in California and the American Southwest.
b. facilitate the return of women to the home, and to help veterans become reintegrated into society.
c. close the CCC camps and help the young men either return home or locate an enlistment office for the branch of service in which they were interested.
d. select sites for the new defense facilities to be built across the country.
e. return the migrant workers to Mexico when the war ended and their services were no longer needed.
Question 24. Women participated in the U.S. World War II effort by
Select one:
a. working in war plants.
b. growing Victory Gardens.
c. playing in baseball leagues.
d. All of these choices.
e. joining the military.
Question 25. Which agency's job was to set wages, working conditions, and hours, as well as to try to prevent strikes?
Select one:
a. Office of Price Administration
b. National War Labor Board
c. Fair Employment Practices Committee
d. War Production Board
e. Office of War Mobilization
Question 26. When Franklin Roosevelt came into the presidency, he set out to mend relations with the countries of Latin America by using
Select one:
a. his plans to pull all American troops out of every Latin American country.
b. the "good neighbor" policy.
c. the policy of "dollar diplomacy."
d. the Lend-Lease Policy.
e. the Roosevelt Corollary to the Roosevelt Corollary.
Question 27. How did the U.S. emerge from World War II?
Select one:
a. As one of the world's two superpowers, along with the Soviet Union.
b. As the world's sole superpower.
c. None of these.
d. As an exhausted and weakened country, compared to other countries.
Question 28. Roughly 90 percent of all Americans favored isolationism despite the situation in Europe for all of the following reasons except
Select one:
a. The problems of the Great Depression had Americans focused on improving conditions at home.
b. They were haunted by memories of World War I and its brutality.
c. America was riddled with anti-Semitism and did not want to get into war over Jews.
d. Americans did not want to bear the cost of war, which they feared would only deepen the Depression.
e. Many Americans respected Adolf Hitler.
Question 29. In return for an opening of a second front against Nazi Germany in the West in the summer of 1944, Stalin promised at the Tehran Conference
Select one:
a. peaceful cooperation in the occupation of Germany.
b. to forget about past tensions in Russian-American foreign policy confrontations.
c. to open a front against Japan once Germany had been defeated.
d. to give up parts of his Southeast European colonial possessions.
e. military assistance.
Question 30. Which of the following is not true about the Holocaust?
Select one:
a. German death camps began operations as early as 1942.
b. The mass killing of European Jews remained confined to concentration camps.
c. Until 1940, few outside Europe knew about Hitler's processes of terror and murder.
d. Hitler's first step in murdering six million European Jews involved intimidating, isolating, and concentrating Jews in work and concentration camps throughout Europe.
Question 31. The Lend Lease Act, passed mainly for the benefit of Great Britain, empowered the president to
Select one:
a. lend weapons and supplies to all nations fighting either the Germans or the Japanese.
b. offer military materiel to any country willing to fight against the Germans.
c. lend money but no hardware to those threatened by Germany.
d. put warships in the Pacific to protect American interests from the Japanese.
e. send advisers to assist any country fighting the Germans.
Question 32. Stalin enthusiastically agreed to the four policemen approach to securing the postwar peace because
Select one:
a. he wanted to engage France, Britain, and the United States in a coalition rather than have them build cordial and friendly ties to Germans, turning them once again into a threat to the Soviet Union.
b. he thought it was Roosevelt's way of promising that governments friendly to Soviet interests would be installed in Eastern Europe.
c. he did not want to bear the burden of the reorganization of Europe.
d. he understood that the United Nations could not possibly fulfill that role.
e. he shied away from picking up the tab for the reconstruction of Europe.
Question 33. Which of the following statements about World War II is not correct?
Select one:
a. Historic buildings - some a thousand or more years old - were obliterated in Europe by the war.
b. More than 23 million Soviets lost their lives.
c. The war deaths worldwide totaled over 62 million.
d. About half of the Jews killed were from Poland, and about half from other European countries.
e. About 1 million American soldiers died and about half that figure came home injured.
Question 34\. Truman decided to drop the atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima and later Nagasaki because
Select one:
a. All of these choices.
b. Japan did not respond to an Allied ultimatum to end the war or face destruction.
c. he wanted to demonstrate the full force of the U.S. military.
d. he knew that the Japanese and German governments were developing a bomb of their own.
e. he feared if he did not strike first, Japan would again launch an attack on U.S. soil, more devastating than Pearl Harbor.
Question 35. How did the war change the landscape at home in the United States?
Select one:
a. All of these choices.
b. The economies in states west of the Mississippi experienced the largest economic boom.
c. People moved North, South and West in search of defense jobs.
d. Southern states saw rapid industrial development and growth.
e. California faced housing shortages as record numbers of people relocated there.
Question 36. In the Munich Agreement (1938), the leaders of Britain and France
Select one:
a. elicited a promise from Hitler to end further aggressive action on smaller European countries.
b. allowed Hitler to annex all of Czechoslovakia.
c. confronted Hitler about his treatment of the plight of Jews, communists, and gays in Germany, but in the name of peace, dropped the subject.
d. permitted Hitler to occupy strategic areas of Czechoslovakia, in the hope that he would stop there.
e. told Hitler and Mussolini that they would not go to war against Nazi Germany if Hitler decided to annex German-speaking provinces of western Poland.
Question 37. The "Double V" campaign refers to
Select one:
a. U.S. victory against the Japanese and the Germans.
b. Roosevelt's initiative to build public support for America's entry into World War II.
c. None of these choices.
d. growing victory gardens at home to help feed servicemen overseas.
e. African American efforts to win the war overseas and end discrimination at home.
Question 38. Which of these events did not happen at Potsdam?
Select one:
a. Both the Americans and British became more concerned about and suspicious of Stalin and his political intentions than they had been earlier in the war.
b. Churchill was called home mid-conference because his party had been defeated in a general election.
c. Poland was given an outlet to the sea and had its prewar territorial integrity and political independence fully restored and protected.
d. The Allies divided Germany and Austria into four occupied zones.
e. Truman learned that the atom bomb had been tested successfully.
Question 39. The Japanese decided to bomb America's naval fleet at Pearl Harbor because
Select one:
a. they hoped to handicap the U.S. navy, giving Japan time to achieve its conquests before the U.S. could rebuild and strike back.
b. they wanted the United States out of China.
c. they hoped to pull Americans into the war.
d. they were angry when Americans blocked Japanese imports to the U.S. and influenced other countries to do the same.
e. they were acting on behalf of Germany.
Question 40. Similar to a militant and extreme version of the New Deal, the deficit spending by Hitler's Nazi government during the 1930s, including a massive German arms buildup which put many Germans to work, helped pull Germany out of its economic depression by 1936.
Select one:
a. True
b. False.