Harley, Indian or Excelsior: Which Motorcycle Engine Powered the First Snowmobiles to Go to War?
The October 31, 1943, issue of the British Edition of Yank, the Army Weekly, includes a feature article, “Arctic Adventure.” The title image of the piece is a black-and-white shot of a G.I. on a “motor sled” on the Greenland Ice Sheet. Second Lieutenant Randolph Post Eddy and 11 other men, two more officers, seven enlisted men, and one civilian dog sled musher were to be posted on what Yank staff correspondent Sgt. H. N. Oliphant called “The ice cube tray of the world’s refrigerator.”
With the U.S. in pitched battles in the European and Pacific Theaters, you may ask, “What were G.I.s doing riding early snowmobiles on the ice of Greenland?”
It turns out they were carrying out two critically essential missions for the success of the U.S. 8th Army Air Corps and the Royal Air Force—and all other air operations over Europe, for that matter.
They reported weather conditions at three strategic points on the Greenland Ice Sheet to the command center on the southern end of Greenland via radio four times a day. They reported on where they were sheltered and two monitoring substations, five miles south and 20 miles west. They had to go to the substations for the data—no remote monitoring 80 years ago. Scientists knew weather patterns over Greenland would help predict the weather reaching Nazi-occupied Europe about three days later.
The other part of their mission was to rescue crews of aircraft forced down or crashed on the ice. That was a grim and difficult task complicated by poor communications, frequent savage blizzard conditions, and incredibly dangerous terrain that included glacial ice with deep crevasses.
Indeed, during the nine-month mission, Lt. Max Demorast of Flint, Mich., the only member of the military team with Arctic ice knowledge, was killed when the motor sled he was operating fell into a snow-covered crevasse.
The machine shown in action on the mission appears to be one of the motorized toboggan designs built by Carl Eliason’s company in Sayner, Wisc., and the FWD (Four Wheel Drive Auto Co.) in Clintonville, Wisc., between 1940 and 1946 (Phase II design, model C). That model would have been one of the 150 motor sleds purchased by the War Department, as today’s Department of Defense was called then. Those models came with the Indian 45ci V-twins that produced 25 horsepower. Eliason patented the original design in 1927. Up until 1931, when Excelsior went out of business, those engines were also used on some models.
Despite being built in Sayner and Clintonville, only a few hours’ drive from Harley-Davidson’s factory in Milwaukee, an Excelsior twin and inline-4, and the 25-horsepower Indian V-twin were used instead of Harley-Davidson V-twins. The Indian powerplant was used because it came with a single cast unit for engine and transmission—unit construction—which the company favored because it reduced weight, saved space, and made assembly of the sleds easier and faster. Harley-Davidson’s design utilized a separate engine and transmission (aka non-unit).
Despite being frozen out of the snowmobile business, Harley-Davidson retained the lion’s share of the military motorcycle business. Production data shows that from 1941 to 1945, Harley-Davidson built 59,718 WLAs (U.S. Army), 17,972 WLCs (Canadian Army), 1,357 WLR (Russian Army) 45ci V-twin models, and 1,000 XA (opposed twin boxer, shaft-drive) models, for a total of 79,047 units.
Indian, meanwhile, produced only 39,054 units over the same period, of which 24,928 were under military contract. That included about 1,000 examples of the unique shaft-drive transverse V-twins, designated model 841. So, it’s unlikely Harley-Davidson would have missed the minuscule number of engine/transmission packages Indian sold for snowmobile use.
In addition to Eddy and Demorast, the mission included S/Sgt. Charles Howes of Stamford, Conn., S/Sgt. Arthur Hall of Chicago, Sgt. Willis Bell of Minnesota, Sgt. Simon Karatzas of Brooklyn, Sgt. Don Tetley of Weeping Spring, Texas, Cpl. Arthur Goldstrom of Baltimore, and T/4 Joseph Linton of Fernandina, Florida.
The men were on duty in Greenland continuously from September 1942 to May 1943. During that winter, their post was buried under 25 feet of snow. At the height of winter, leaving the hut was done by a hatch in the building’s roof. Going to the latrine was accomplished by crawling out a window, down a 50-foot-long tunnel through the snow to a wooden one-hole plank set over a trench. With no heat or running water, bathroom breaks tended to be very brief.
During the nine-month mission, the men’s only contact with the rest of the world was two bags of mail air-dropped to the post in November and March and one radio program once a week. Since their only source of electrical power was a gas-fueled generator, use of the radio equipment to receive anything but mission-related transmissions was extremely limited.
When the mission finally ended, the men had doubts about whether their weather observation data made much of a difference; indeed, they questioned whether all of their transmissions were received. It wasn’t until they were back at the command post that they were informed that all of their transmissions had been received, on time, and complete, and had provided vital information for the air war over Europe.
By 1953, Indian was out of business entirely. Despite numerous revival efforts, Indian was not on solid ground in the motorcycle business until Polaris Industries took over the marque in 2011. That story is told in Darwin Holmstrom’s book, Indian Motorcycle 120 Years of America’s First Motorcycle Company, which we have reviewed
Ironically, AMF-era Harley-Davidson took a crack at the snowmobile business in 1970, building beautiful 398cc and 440cc machines. Good as they were—and collectible now—The Motor Company slid out of the sled business for good by 1975.
