Adolf Hitler: My Part in his Downfall (Spike Milligan War Memoirs)

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I would sugest that people should endevour to get the original version to get an understanding of the total cock- up that he was thrown into in his first few days of the war. The book has a tone of photo's and drawings which are a nice addition to the text, and fit well with the way the book is written. His mother is digging the air-raid shelter when Neville Chamberlain announces that Britain is at war with Germany. This book is quite different from other soldiers memoirs I've read before (my favorite probably being All the Way to Berlin: A Paratrooper at War in Europe), mostly because it is written in a humorous style.

It's like director Norman Cohen was influence by two then recent films, "MASH" and "Oh What A Lovely War", both anti war comic looks at war and what he should have done was a Carry On type of film. While there he was given the usual punitive tasks such as shovelling coke into a single pile in pouring rain, but his guards also appreciated his artistic ability, and he was asked to draw Vargas girls for them to hang on the wall.A squadron of Tommies, all gloriously drunk on wicked mischief, set out to launch a surprise attack on the Turkish bath in London where their Commanding Officer Major General Clive Candy is relaxing in the welcome warmth before the actual drill begins. Based on the way this account of Spike Milligan's time in the British military during World War II reads, you'll wonder afterward how in the heck the Allies ever won the thing. A shell from World War I is eventually found and they make strenuous attempts to fire it for practice. I'm a big Jim Dale fan and love comedian Spike Milligan, so when I swa this movie was based on Spike Milligan's sidesplitting autobiography and that Jim Dale was plying Spike and the wonderfully demented Spike was playing his father I was looking foward to this film, but was very disapointed.

The family response is for Spike, his father and brother to produce boyish drawings of war machines (the drawings are included in the book), which are taken to the War Office. It stars Jim Dale as the young Terence "Spike" Milligan, while Milligan himself plays the part of his father, Leo. He then plunged into the world of Show Business, seduced by his first stage appearance, at the age of eight, in the nativity play of his Poona convent school. Roughly every third sentence is a joke, and most are good - sometimes, randomly, the horrors and insanity of his situation creeps in for a paragraph where he describes (without joking) how a fellow soldier died in an accident, or how decades later he visited the same place and cannot deal with the ghosts ('What’s happened to us all since then? There are lighter comic digs made at stiff-upper-lipped authority, the abysmal cooking, the futile marches and camping trails that only amount up to idleness, farce and trivial affairs.There is a lot of outrageous humour to be found in the pages, some of it is recklessly obscene and deliciously off-the-wall and audacious; there are also crackling one-liners, rambunctious dance evenings that explode into chaos, drunken behaviour, pratfalls during setting up and shifting camp and through it all, you will be nearly tickled to death. I read it to bits and the more I read it the more I appreciated that Spike has given a fair picture, surreal as it is, of what life was like for young men like him and his bombadier mates who suddenly found themselves in the army. No missing or damaged pages, no creases or tears, no underlining or highlighting of text, and no writing in the margins. My Dad was a massive fan and yet I can't believe I've never had Spike Milligan in my own life before now. Like now I suppose but with the added knowledge that the person you were shagging might be dead tomorrow.

The last page for example when he talks about two tragedies, lightens it with the story of the Burnt Bum Affair before hitting you with the final line. The fact there was a gun fight in a club and Milligan was the only one still playing; just one of the many funny anecdotes in this story. Spike's silliness is infectious and the book contains a winning combination of word play, self deprecating humour and social history. Yes, it's irreverent, yes, it's disrespectful, but laughing in the face of tragedy is how we Brits keep from going insane. If you roared with laughter after finishing 'Catch 22', this one comes highly recommended to you, to see the other side of the Atlantic going bonkers over the war long before the actual fighting began.These men are sometimes "posted", which is described in a footnote as "the art of being shifted sideways".