We came across the Flying Flea display at the bridge last weekend. What pulled us in first were the modern Royal Enfield prototypes, sharp and clean at The Bridge show in the Hamptons of New York. Their team mentioned the design traced back to a vintage motorcycle, but what surprised us was just how deep that story runs, so we started to dig.
It begins in 1930s Germany with the DKW RT100, a featherweight two stroke nicknamed the Little Wonder. In Holland, the importer Stokvis ran the bikes and their technician Joop van Heusden, better known as Motor Joop, was so impressed he built a three rider team that raced them successfully. He even sent suggestions back to Germany that improved the RT’s performance and finish. When the Nazis stripped Stokvis of the DKW franchise because several of its directors were Jewish, Joop wasn’t done. He went looking for a replacement. He approached Royal Enfield directly, traveled to Redditch, the English town where Royal Enfield was based, and convinced them to build a mirror image of the RT with a bigger engine. Out of that effort the “Royal Baby” was born.
The war turned that little commuter into something else entirely. Arthur Bourne, a trials rider and magazine editor, staged a demonstration for the War Office. He rode the Enfield over logs and bomb craters with ease. Major General Frederick Browning, who commanded Britain’s airborne forces and happened to be a rider himself, watched the display and made the call: “We must have these.”
The result was the Flying Flea. A motorcycle light enough to carry over a wall or shoulder through a river. The army asked for folding bars, folding pegs, a quiet exhaust, and a leak proof fuel cap. They even designed steel cradles so the entire bike could be dropped by parachute. Early drop tests from Halifax and Lancaster bombers bent wheels until the frames were beefed up, but once they held together production ramped up. In practice, only a few went down by parachute; most were carried inside Horsa gliders or brought ashore on landing craft.
Thousands of Fleas went into combat. They helped establish communications during the D-Day landings in Normandy, and during Operation Market Garden in Holland. At Arnhem, British paratroopers held out against German tanks for a week with Fleas scattered among them. A few machines were captured and pressed into German service. Normandy beachmasters loved them, calling for hundreds to marshal the chaos of the beaches as waves of men and supplies poured ashore.
After the war the Flea got a paint job and a second life. The Model RE 125 was cheap, reliable, and easy to ride. Nurses rode them to work, stuntmen looped them in steel cages, and trials riders took them up rocky hillsides. It was perfect for a country that still had food rations and no money.
Decades later the Flea came back as nostalgia. The olive drab Pegasus edition in 2018. And now the prototypes we saw at the bridge. The new Flying Flea EV. Heritage nods are everywhere in motorcycling, but this one carries real weight. The original Flea wasn’t built to sell nostalgia. It was built to solve problems no other bike could. To be tossed from a plane, flown in a glider, or rolled off a landing craft into a war zone and still get its rider where he needed to go. Seeing the modern prototypes lined up, the connection feels clear without suggesting they were built for the same purpose. They aren’t just another set of shiny motorcycles. They’re the continuation of one of the most remarkable small machines ever built.
There was a lot to see at The Bridge. Full recap coming soon!
