“On the battlefields 145,012 people died in those two years, while road casualties last year alone reached 147,500, despite a drop in the number of private cars on the road from two million in 1939 to a mere 718,000 by this year.”
Yikes!!! Currently the US has about 40,000/yr road fatalities with 300 million population v. UK’s 50 million or so in WWII, IIRC.
I found a chart from the Parliament web site that gives highway fatalities for 1942 as 6,926. It shows total casualties as 148k. I suspect the etherington contributor mixed his apples and oranges.
www.parliament.uk/briefing-papers/SN02198.pdf