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

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No missing or damaged pages, no creases or tears, no underlining or highlighting of text, and no writing in the margins. 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.

It was a little hard to get into at first, given the colloquialisms that Milligan is wont to use, but you get used to it fairly quickly (at least I did, being an American who's an Anglophile at heart). For all the privations of army life, it is clear that Spike had a lot of fun during this period, and the humour that was to make his name with the Goons and beyond is here in abundance. The regiment is also blessed with soldiers who are no use to anybody, disruptive or even mentally disturbed. Published in 1971, Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall is the first volume of the Spike Milligan's idiosyncratic military memoir. He received his first education in a tent in the Hyderabad Sindh desert and graduated from there, through a series of Roman Catholic schools in India and England, to the Lewisham Polytechnic.The cover may have some limited signs of wear but the pages are clean, intact and the spine remains undamaged. There are vividly nightmarish scenes of nerve-wracking despair meshed ingeniously in between the more rib-tickling sequences; there is also a heightened sense of the irreparable damage that destruction and death leave on mere mortals, not least of all the hapless troops marching to war themselves. This book has laugh out loud lines on every page, and I would guess all the other volumes will have too.

The names, whether made up or real, are straight from a Waugh novel – Battery Sergeant-Major ‘Jumbo’ Day for example could easily have been a character in “Men at Arms”. There is also Bill Maynard as the sargent and fellow recruits Tony Selby and "Keeping Up Appearences" Onslow, Geoffrey Hughes but they don't do much with them Lowe who know's his character well comes off best of the supporting cast and Dale is wonderfully demented as Spike, but the film doesn't take off.The film is about Spike being drafted into the army at the beginning of WWII and covered his basic training. Dale was nominated for the BAFTA Award for Most Promising Newcomer to Leading Film Roles for his performance.