When Harley-Davidson debuted the Pan America adventure bike, the marketeers made sure they mentioned the company’s past adventure bikes, sort of. They didn’t mention all therebadged Italian-built bikes of the 1960s and 1970s, they didn’t mention theMT500/MT350, they didn’t mention the offroad versions of the original Sporster series—but they did mention the WLA, the go-anywhere bike that GIs rode in World War II.

Was the WLAreally一次冒新利18苹果险的自行车吗?这取决于你如何看待它. It was a military vehicle built for practical service, not aimed at the civilian market, and there was certainly no accompanying raft of Touratech accessories. Plenty of other companies built similar bikes for the war effort, and those companies’ marketing departments haven’t gone out of their way to proclaim those as first-generation adventure bikes.

On the other hand, the WLA was indeed built to ride almost anywhere, and through World War II the Allied military put these to use in every environment imaginable; in the years afterwards, civilians did the same. (Read The Bear’sWLAaargh!series for insight as to how that worked out). As it turns out, you don’t need to have long-travel suspension to have adventure—you just have to be willing to push yourself and your machine to the limit, and sometimes beyond.

Whatwasthe WLA?

The WLA was a military-only bike that Harley-Davidson built on contract for the United States and other Allied nations (for instance, Canada got a variant called the WLC). It was very similar to the WL model, which H-D made for the civilian market starting in the late ’30s, but with several obvious and not-so-obvious tweaks to make this fit for Army usage. The fenders were trimmed down, to avoid mud clogging; the crankcase breather was relocated, to make it easier to cross rivers; Harley-Davidson fitted lights that conformed to wartime blackout regulations. They shared the same 45ci engine, an air-cooled 45-degree V-twin with sidevalve top end, three-speed gearbox and foot clutch/hand shifter. See below for an excellent video on the bike’s operation:

With a 5:1 compression ratio, these were not high-performance engines; peak output was around 25 horsepower. The military was just fine with this; these bikes were made to run on bad gas, on bad roads. They were not intended for hot laps at TT Circuit Assen. As The Bearsaid about his:

When I call the WLAs versatile, what I mean is that you could do just about anything with and to them. That was useful because petrol was still in short supply. We discovered that due to the low compression of the 750 side-valve engines, they would run on easily-available kerosene as long as they were primed with petrol and bump-started down our steep street. You just had to make sure you applied the kick starter immediately if you stalled, otherwise the engine would be too cold to fire up again.

Since this machine was really just a quick repackaging of existing designs, with olive drab paint instead of careful detailing, it had a chain drive, unlike the shaft drives that Zundapp and BMW used for their military motorcycles. The Allies would have liked a shaft drive bike, and Harley-Davidson did build some prototypes with this design (basically a copy of the Axis bikes). So did Indian, which actually produced a few hundred 841-series machines, which also had a transverse V-twin engine layout. However, by the time those bikes were under development, US military leaders realized Jeeps had many advantages over motorcycles when it came to combat duties, and concentrated on cranking those out. So, the WLA soldiered on, even though it wasn’t exactly what the Army wanted.

Since it was based on 1930s motorcycle tech, the WLA had no rear suspension, just a big tractor-style seat on a spring. The front end had a crude springer fork. This bike was far removed from the current electro-suspension on the market, and frankly, would not have been a comfortable ride on a paved road, let alone a potato field in Normandy, with an MG-42 buzzing away in a nearby headgerow.

But, comfort was not the goal—the goal was usability, and while the WLA might not have been the best military motorcycle on the market in 1942, it was what the US had, and it got the job done in World War II and later in Korea. Remember that these old, crude bike designs were very field-fixable compared to today’s machines (again, read The Bear’s stories!), and that was a good thing when your supply chain consisted of a string of boats back-and-forth across an ocean infested with U-boats.

The WLA’s afterlife

Since Harley-Davidson made trainloads of these for the war effort, many were available afterwards when the hostilities ended, as army surplus. Ex-GIs bought them up, along with civilians, and these became popular all-round bikes, and especial favorites of the custom scene. If you want to build a cut-down, it makes sense to start with a cheap bike, and those surplus bikes were affordable. That’s how The Bear got his, and thousands of other riders like him.

In the decades since the Baby Boom years, the WLA has gained asecondafterlife as a favorite vehicle for war re-enactors and other history geeks. It’s much easier and cheaper to find parts for a WLA than a Sherman tank, but now the people rebuilding these to their military glory have a different problem—with the post-war popularity of these bikes, few remain in original condition. They’ve been hacked up into bobbers and choppers or stripped for parts.

However, when you do see one that’s restored and up for auction (likethis bike at Mecum), you can see why the WLA became an icon. It’s a good-looking machine, even in its grim wartime paint, and you can see how this managed to influence the next 80 years of cruiser aesthetics.

Mecumsold one of these at its January auction, but without a listed sale price, it’s hard to know what to expect for the similar machine up for auctionat next week’s March 31-April 2 sale. We expect, however, that if you have to ask the expected sale price, you probably can’t afford it.