WWI Motorcycle Beach Patrols
Motorcycles were already proving useful in World War I as dispatch machines, scout vehicles, and fast military transportation, but one of the stranger American experiments took place far from the trenches. In 1917 the U.S. Coast Guard tried putting Indian Powerplus motorcycles directly onto the beach, using them to patrol long stretches of Florida shoreline for suspicious landings, signaling, and coastal activity.
On paper it made sense. A motorcycle could cover miles of sand far faster than a surfman walking his patrol. In practice, the beach proved to be about the worst possible operating environment for a 1917 motorcycle. Salt water, soft sand, high tides, rock ledges, weak batteries, overheating engines, and a painfully slow parts supply turned the Coast Guard’s motorcycle beach patrols into a short-lived wartime experiment.
Why the Coast Guard Tried Motorcycles in 1917
When the United States entered World War I on April 6, 1917, President Woodrow Wilson placed the Coast Guard under the Department of the Navy. That gave the Navy access to the Coast Guard’s cutters, which helped bolster the wartime fleet but left gaps along the American coast. The day-to-day job of watching isolated beaches fell back onto Coast Guard surfmen working from former Life-Saving Service stations.
Those beach-station patrols were still largely nineteenth-century work. A surfman walked his route, carried his patrol clock, watched the shoreline, and had little immediate communication with the station beyond old signaling methods such as flares. That system could work for lifesaving duty, but it was slow for wartime coastal defense.
Earlier in 1917, officials received reports of “strange doings and night signaling...at various points on the east coast [of Florida].” The reports suggested possible enemy agents, suspicious lantern signals, or landing activity, but the Coast Guard could not investigate quickly when the only available response was to send a man down the beach on foot. The Eighth Naval District in Jacksonville and Coast Guard officials in Florida pushed for motorized patrols that could cover more ground and report back faster.
The resulting motorcycle patrols were small, practical, and very local. They were not a broad motorcycle invasion-defense corps. They were Coast Guard beach-station patrols, usually one surfman and one machine assigned to a defined stretch of shoreline. In the available record, they appear to be the only documented World War I beach-patrol program built around motorcycles, which makes them a fascinating side note alongside the broader use of American motorcycles in World War I.
The Indian Powerplus Order
Coast Guard Captain-Commandant Ellsworth P. Bertholf approved the idea and sent a request through the Navy Department for thirteen motorcycles. The specification was precise: “type N.E. Indian motor cycle, 1917, Powerplus Twin Cylinder, cradle spring frame, three speed type with complete electrical equipment, including ammeter.” The request also called for “all machines to be finished in olive drab color.”
The machines were Indian Powerplus twins, roughly 61 cubic inches, with a three-speed transmission, spring cradle frame, and electrical equipment. They were sturdy motorcycles for their day, but they were not purpose-built sand machines. There is no evidence that they received special beach tires, extra corrosion protection, or other major modifications beyond the patrol equipment needed for Coast Guard work.
The plan put twelve motorcycles on Florida’s east coast and one in Texas, at Point Isabel. Each assigned station was expected to identify a man who could ride, understand machinery, and keep the motorcycle in service. That last requirement turned out to matter just as much as riding skill.
The condition of the machines raised questions almost immediately. The Navy had not necessarily supplied pristine new motorcycles, and the number of early failures led some observers to speculate that the Coast Guard may have received used Indian machines previously connected with Marine Corps service in Haiti. That remains a speculation, not a proven fact, but the trouble began as soon as the motorcycles reached the stations.
Jupiter Inlet and Edward Forbes
The first motorcycle reached the Jupiter Inlet Light House in Florida on September 26, 1917. Surfman Edward Forbes assembled it and found the usual sort of problems that can sour a new military experiment before it even starts: minor parts were missing and the gas tank leaked.
Forbes still managed to make the motorcycle useful. He rode it about 40 miles to West Palm Beach to collect the missing parts and have repairs made, then took it on a 200-mile test ride. In his journal he reported that the motorcycle functioned to his “satisfaction,” which was about as good a beginning as the Coast Guard could have hoped for.
The first real patrol showed the difference between a road test and a beach patrol. Forbes headed onto the sand and quickly discovered that a rock ledge about two miles north of his station, and another ledge to the south, blocked the route. That must have been frustrating, especially since the same stretch of beach would have been familiar on foot. What a surfman could pick his way around slowly was not necessarily something a motorcycle could cross.
On October 2, Forbes tried again. This time the tide caught him. He was forced to leave the motorcycle stranded on the beach and retrieve it the next day at low tide. The machine survived, but only after several more days of work to get it back into running condition. By the end of October the Jupiter motorcycle had also dealt with a dead battery, running out of oil, and other mechanical problems. It had been out of service for 17 days.
Forbes’s experience also shows how the patrol was supposed to work when the machine did run. A route like Jupiter’s covered a long beach sector, roughly in the St. Lucie Inlet and Lake Worth area, and the motorcycle was intended to turn that into a daily patrol instead of a slow foot march. The motorcycle gave speed, but only until tide, sand, rocks, or mechanical trouble took it away.
Fort Lauderdale and the Repair Problem
The same pattern appeared at other stations. Fort Lauderdale’s motorcycle arrived in October 1917, and within four days of starting patrol duty the machine overheated badly enough that the engine had to be overhauled. A week later it had to be left on the beach, where salt water shorted the electrical system.
Fort Lauderdale’s first operator, John L. Simmons, was working under Keeper Skogsberg at Station No. 208. The station journals show the motorcycle being used, repaired, disabled, and used again. The trouble was not just rider abuse or one bad machine. Beach patrol was a terrible job for the equipment. Engines overheated, batteries failed, magnetos and wiring suffered, and salt water found everything vulnerable.
Local civilian shops became part of the story because official parts support was slow. The Fort Lauderdale bicycle and motorcycle shop shown below was one of the places where Coast Guard motorcycles were repaired. That image says a lot about the experiment: a Navy-funded wartime patrol machine, kept alive by local mechanical improvisation because the official supply chain could not keep pace.
What the Surfmen Carried
The motorcycles were not simply transportation. They were part of a small coastal-defense package built around speed, observation, and communication. Patrolmen carried a revolver and the standard patrol clock, and the stations received small arms as part of the wartime program. Springfield rifles and Colt .38-caliber revolvers were issued to beach-station crews, making the old surfmen into armed coastal guards.
The most interesting equipment was the communication gear. A motorcycle patrol could carry a telegraph key and wire, then tie into existing coastal telegraph lines along the route. That gave the patrolman a way to report suspicious activity without riding all the way back to the station first. The idea was sound: if the surfman saw a landing, signaling, wreckage, or anything else suspicious, he needed minutes, not hours, to get word back.
This was one place where the motorcycle experiment pointed in the right direction even if the motorcycles themselves failed. The old foot-patrol system was too slow for wartime coastal defense, and the Coast Guard needed better communication from isolated shoreline positions. The patrol motorcycles were a fast but fragile answer to that problem.
Why the Experiment Failed
Throughout 1918, the motorcycles continued to be a problem. Parts were not readily available locally and often had to be ordered directly from the manufacturer. Those orders could take four to twelve weeks to arrive. At times, contemporary accounts and later summaries estimate that roughly 75 percent of the motorcycle fleet was out of commission while waiting on parts or repairs.
The failure list reads exactly like what you would expect from running early motorcycles in surf and sand: leaky tanks, dead batteries, magneto trouble, overheating, flat tires, oil problems, damaged wiring, and corrosion. The Indian Powerplus was a capable motorcycle, but it was being asked to do a job it had not been designed to do.
There were accidents as well. Forbes later reported that a floorboard folded up and blocked his brake pedal, causing him to lose control and run into a bridge railing. At Fort Lauderdale, Surfman Wallace King was thrown when he hit a log covered with seaweed during a night patrol. He survived, but it was a reminder that the beach itself was not a road. It changed with every tide.
The Coast Guard surfmen deserve some credit here. There was no formal motorcycle training program that turned them into military motorcyclists. The stations selected men who had some riding or mechanical ability, and the riders learned by doing. They diagnosed battery and ignition trouble, coaxed damaged machines home, waited for parts, and kept trying to make the patrols work. The problem was not a lack of determination. It was the environment.
As a service-machine experiment, the patrol motorcycles proved both the appeal and the limit of early motorization. A motorcycle could move a surfman quickly down a hard beach. It could not reliably replace a foot patrol when the route included soft sand, high water, rock ledges, salt spray, and no ready supply of repair parts.
After the Armistice
The Armistice on November 11, 1918 removed the urgency and the funding that had kept the motorcycle beach patrols alive. By February 1919, most of the remaining motorcycles and spare parts had been sent to the Navy base at Key West. A few stations kept motorcycles, but those were generally used on road patrols rather than being sent back out into the sand and surf.
With the motorcycle experiment over, the beach patrol returned to foot duty. The Coast Guard had learned that motorcycles could cover ground quickly, but also that speed meant little if the machine spent half its life waiting on parts or being dried out after the tide caught it.
The idea did not become a lasting World War I doctrine. In later coastal-defense work, especially during World War II, beach patrols depended more on foot patrols, horses, jeeps, telephones, and other communication systems. The 1917–1919 motorcycle patrols remain one of those odd, practical, and very revealing wartime experiments: a good idea on paper, beaten by the beach.
Source Note
Source information for this article came from William R. Wells II, “Patrolling the Coastline on Wheels,” originally published in Prologue Magazine, Fall 2009.