This thought occurred to me while playing an online WW2 game. I crashed my truck into an allied tank and yelled at them for driving on the wrong side of the road. They yelled back at me in thick European accents that it was me who was driving on the wrong side. It occurred to me at that moment that similar incidents must have occurred during the real war.
What side of the road did allied forces drive on during World War 2? Did differences in road laws cause any significant or notable incidents? Was this a source of contention between different allied forces?
All the mainland European countries keep right, so road signs, turn lanes, and even the few existing German autobahnen were set up for driving right. This obviously would have seemed perfectly natural to American and Soviet troops, whose vehicles had left-hand controls. A bit more adaptation would have been required of British troops, and it’s quite possible that they observed their home-country practice in certain controlled corridors where only British armed forces were traveling, or for convoys. Similarly, US troops with their own training bases in the UK may have had local rules while on base, but naturally needed to observe local laws if they drove into a nearby village.
The portions of North Africa under French control would have had a keep-right rule. Egypt, despite UK control prior to 1922, never adopted keep-left. In any case, this theater of war was so comparatively empty that might makes right. If you’re in a Jeep, there’s little point standing your ground against an approaching tank.
As the US hopped from island to island in the Pacific Theater, existing driving rules were largely irrelevant because there were so few vehicles among native populations. Okinawa had only 250 vehicles, and occupying US troops imposed a keep-right rule that lasted until Okinawa was returned to left-driving Japan in 1972. With hundreds of thousands of left-driving vehicles, including left-running/left-loading trams in all the large cities, no effort was made by occupying US forces to change the rule in the Japanese home islands.
The definitive reference work on this subject is Peter Kincaid's 1986 book The Rule of the Road: An International Guide to History and Practice.
^*Austria ^was ^forced ^to ^change ^to ^keep-right ^after ^German ^occupation; ^neutral ^Sweden ^kept ^left ^until ^1967 ^but ^saw ^no ^occupying ^troops.