Harley

1942 Harley-Davidson XA | USA 🇺🇸

In 1941 Harley-Davidson got a US Government contract for the development of a new motorcycle designated for military operations in North Africa.

Model WLA which was already delivered to the US Army did not have one important feature which was critically important under the severe conditions of moving in dust and sand: the shaft drive. Thus Harley-Davidson XA was born (XA means “experimental, army-use”), and this was a motorcycle that had little in common with the main Harley-Davidson product line-up, even though it was outfitted with a twin-cylinder, horizontally-opposed engine, that was practically identical to the 739 cc engine of Model WLA.

By 1941 German engineers have already learned that the exposed chain drive gets quickly disabled under desert conditions and that using shaft drives is the only way to reliability. This why John Nowak, XA’s designer, decided to apply Wehrmacht’s engineering research and, practically speaking, made his XA a copy of some captured BMW R71 (some sources say that it was rather R12), a machine successfully used in the military campaign by Hitler’s African Corps.