CarBrandLogos archive · Harley-Davidson · 1940

Harley-DavidsonWLA

The Liberator: a side-valve V-twin that went to war and came home a chopper.

Photo: User:Bukvoed · CC BY 2.5

The story

A defining chapter in Harley-Davidson history.

Explore the ideas, engineering and context that shaped the Harley-Davidson WLA, then continue into its specifications and place in the marque's lineage.

Origins

Harley-Davidson spent the Second World War building essentially one thing in quantity. The WLA was a militarised version of the company's 45-cubic-inch side-valve V-twin road bike, with a three-speed hand-shift gearbox, blackout lighting, a scabbard for a submachine gun, heavy-duty air filtration for dust and an oil bath that let it survive conditions no civilian machine faced.

WLA left side manual

Design and engineering

It was not fast and was never meant to be. Riders used it for dispatch, escort, reconnaissance and military police work, and its virtues were the ones that matter in war: it started, it kept running, and it could be fixed with basic tools. Thousands went to the Soviet Union under Lend-Lease, where it was known simply as the Harley, and Canadian forces used a near-identical WLC.

Harley-Davidson Museum February 2024 28 · Michael Barera · CC BY-SA 4.0

In production

Its afterlife was arguably more influential than its service. Enormous quantities of surplus WLAs were sold cheaply to returning servicemen who already knew how to ride and maintain them, and stripping the heavy military equipment off to make the bike lighter and faster produced the bobber, the direct ancestor of the chopper and of American custom motorcycle culture. Production resumed briefly from 1949 to 1952 for the Korean War. Harley's postwar identity was built substantially on a machine designed to carry a rifle.

At a glance