![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Because of the bike’s lithe dimensions, the fact it only weighed 56kg, plus the fact it could be dropped from aircraft, it quickly got brandished with the nickname the ‘Flying Flea’.Īs bikes go, the Flea was as basic as they come. But that name didn’t stick around for long. The War Department ended up placing an order for 4,000 RE models. Being a two-wheel enthusiast himself he declared, “We must have these". One of those was Major General Frederick Browning – the man responsible for providing the new airborne force with special equipment. Impressed, the Army top brass had a go themselves. With years of trials experience, he skipped the little RE across logs, bomb craters and generally bounced it around like a deer who’d drunk too much Robinsons Fruit Shoot. They stopped laughing when someone handy started to ride it. However, it had one crucial upgrade: a bigger, more battlefield applicable 126cc engine.īeing a weedy thing, when Arthur showed the bike to the Army bosses they laughed their heads off thinking it was a joke. See, in the time period that the War Department went from completely disregarding motorbikes to really needing them, British bike manufacturer Royal Enfield had started reverse-engineering the DKW bike in order to produce a similar machine, the Model RE. So Arthur Bourne got on the blower to his mate – Royal Enfield boss Major Frank Smith – and went back to the Army-types with a new idea. By now, the need for paratroopers to have a bike was very real. But the War Department civil servants crossed their arms, shook their heads and said no.įast forward a few years and that all changed when things got particularly fighty across the Channel. Back then, he tried to get them to buy a load of RT100s, a 97.5cc two-stroke made by German manufacturer DKW. In a remarkable case of foresight (and in response to the growing Nazi threat), he’d been rattling the military’s cage since the mid-1930s, stating that a light motorbike for battle was a Good Thing. The effort was largely led by Arthur Bourne, editor of The Motor Cycle (Britain’s top-selling weekly motorbike magazine at the time) and a crucial lynchpin in getting paratroopers moving. So, in early 1942 the campaign for a lighter, more versatile bike began. However, typical military despatch riders’ bikes at the time were too heavy. Which happened.Īn obvious solution was the bicycle’s natural evolved state: a motorcycle. Even if they did survive (the bikes, that is) they were cumbersome, slow and utterly rubbish to get around on if you landed in the wrong, boggy field. And due to this thing called ‘gravity’, lobbing a bike out of a moving plane to then land on a hard surface would, more often than not, leave them looking like crushed Coke cans. But soldiers didn’t really like the idea of jumping out of a plane with the equivalent of a Boris Bike strapped to their chest. Initially, folding bicycles were seen as the solution. What these newfangled flying soldiers needed was transport to be thrown out the plane with them. Now, as you digital war heroes will know, once you land on the ground it’s quite tiresome to get around – especially if you’re lugging a load of kit and weaponry with you. Impressed by Germany’s Fallschirmjäger, Churchill ordered the formation of a 5,000-strong parachute and glider-borne corps in June 1940. Back in WW2 though, throwing military personnel out of an aircraft was a novel, pioneering concept.Īt the outbreak of war in 1939, Britain had no airborne forces. If you’re not, the concept is simple: they’re the airborne force – the soldiers with parachutes on their back that jump out of planes into battle. Now, if you’re one of the 60 million playing Call of Duty: Warzone during lockdown, you’ll be familiar with the role of a paratrooper.
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