WWII Novel Match Trivia Quiz

Answer: "The Cruel Sea" by Nicholas Monsarrat

Sometime lawyer, author in the 1930s of novels informed by his left-of-center politics, Liverpudlian Nicholas Monsarrat didn't come into his own until the Second World War. He served first as a member of an ambulance brigade and then as a member of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve (RNVR).

In the Royal Navy, he served with distinction in a series of small warships (corvettes and frigates), assigned to escort convoys and protect them from enemy attack. By the end of the war, he had risen to the rank of Lieutenant Commander and was commanding officer of a frigate. Resigning his commission in 1946, Monsarrat returned to writing.

He is best known for his numerous sea stories and novels, for which he drew on his wartime experience. The most popular of these is "The Cruel Sea", published in 1951.

Answer: "Where Eagles Dare" by Alastair MacLean

As an enlisted man in the Royal Navy during the war, popular Scottish thriller writer Alastair MacLean saw service in both the Atlantic and the Pacific theaters. Many of his later novels had WWII settings. "Where Eagles Dare" was published in 1967.

Answer: "An Angel in Australia" / "The Order of Innocence" by Thomas Keneally

Prolific Sydney-born author Thomas Keneally has written other fiction and nonfiction set during the war, including the genre-bending 1982 book "Schindler's Ark", which Stephen Spielberg adapted into the 1992 film "Schindler's List". His story of a priest in wartime Sydney was published in his native country as "An Angel in Australia" in 2002 and as "The Order of Innocence" in the UK and the U.S. in 2003.

Answer: "Das Boot" ("The Boat") by Lothar-Gunther Buchheim

As a war correspondent, Lothar-Gunther Buchheim spent time aboard a German submarine in 1943. This experience informed his anti-war novel, "Das Boot", that was not published until thirty years later, in 1973. Depicting both the longs stretches of boredom and the short, intense bursts of terror experienced by men during wartime under the best of circumstances, combined with the particular strains endured by submariners, Buchheim's book is widely considered the best novel of submarine warfare ever written.

Answer: "The Good Shepherd" ("Greyhound") by C.S. Forester

Renowned for his sea stories, C.S. Forester published this gripping tale of U.S. Navy Commander George Krause's initiation into the reality of war in 1955. After the 2020 film adaptation "Greyhound" was released, the novel was reissued under that title.

Answer: "The English Patient" by Michael Ondaatje

In part a sequel to the Canadian author's 1987 novel "In the Skin of a Lion", "The English Patient (1992) is set in an Italian villa during the North African and Italian Campaigns of World War II (). Told through multiple viewpoints and in flashbacks, it is a spy thriller, a historical novel, a psychological novel and a tale that includes at least two love stories.

Answer: "The Final Storm" by Jeff Shaara

American historical novelist Jeff Shaara's firmly fact-based 2011 tale of the ferocious conclusion to the war in the Pacific and its sudden, cataclysmic finale with the dropping of the first nuclear bomb vividly depicts both the naval engagements and the quieter battles waged on the American and Japanese home fronts.

Answer: "Aces" by Robert Denny

Later a journalist, Robert Denny served as a B-17 pilot. His meticulously researched, engagingly written tale of the young men who piloted the Flying Fortresses and the Messerschmidts was published in 1990.

Answer: "The Last Nine Days of the Bismarck" / "Hunting the Bismarck" by C.S. Forester

In this 1959 novel, published as "The Last Nine Days of the Bismarck" in the U.S. and as "Hunting the Bismarck" in Britain, Forester tells the story of the battleship that threatened the convoys of merchantmen, without whose supplies beleaguered Britain couldn't survive and the Royal Navy's desperate bid to sink her. Though the book is a novel, it is closely based on the actual events of the pursuit of and engagement with the Bismarck.

Answer: "Code Talker" by Joseph Bruchac

In his 2005young adult novel, Joseph Bruchac describes, first, the difficult, often dehumanizing realities of life for Native American children in the 1930s and then how, using the very language the white man had tried to beat out of them, some Navajo became Marine radiomen, without whose skill and bravery the war in the Pacific could not have been won.