THE FLEA THAT FLEW

56kg, 150cc, two strokes and 64kmph: the vital statistics of Royal Enfield’s war hero the WD/RE may not impress road warriors today but for the young paratroopers who were airlifted or dropped into action with their ‘Flying Fleas’ in World War II, the little motorbike was very handy behind enemy lines.

“I liked that bike,” says John Jeffries, a 97-year-old parachute regiment veteran. . It looked ‘dinky’. It wasn’t as heavy as the ‘Beezer’, the BSA. What he and other soldiers liked best about it was the weight—it was light enough to lift over battlefield obstacles such as fences or trenches.

What the generals and war-planners liked about it was that it was cheap to produce in numbers and robust enough to get the job done.

Ironically, the Flying Flea was itself ‘inspired’ by a German machine, the RT 100, a 97.5cc made by DKW (an ancestor marque of Audi), which had impressed the motorcycle enthusiast Arthur Bourne, a chum of then RE boss Maj Frank Smith. In 1942 Bourne and Smith demonstrated the capabilities of the RT 100 to a military panel looking for a tough, lightweight vehicle for airborne troops. The rest is Enfield history: The War Department ordered 4000 machines as well as the tubular steel protective ‘cradles’ in which they would be dropped by parachute.

After the war the RE had a successful civilian career and in 1951 a makeover as the RE2. Some 20,000 were manufactured but vanishingly few have survived making the Flea an eminently collectible bike.