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

Product Information

But along the way Spike and his friends get involved in many amusing - and some not-so amusing - scrapes. In this, the first of Spike Milligan's uproarious recollections of life in the army, our hero takes us from the outbreak of war in 1939 ('it must have been something we said'), through his attempts to avoid enlistment ('time for my appendicitis, I thought') and his gunner training in Bexhill ('There was one drawback. Honestly, it's the funniest thing I've read in years and I have now bought all the other books of Spike's in this series.

As Milligan himself states in the introduction, many terrible things happened in the war, but humour helped him cope. We were issued with an air-mail letter, in which we were allowed to say we'd arrived safe and sound.

The preface anticipates the book will be part of a trilogy; years later, the cover of the fourth volume said: "Don't be fooled this is the last, volume four of the war memoirs.

It stars Jim Dale as the young Spike, Arthur Lowe and Bill Maynard, with a cameo appearance by Milligan as his own father. Published in 1971, Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall is the first volume of the Spike Milligan's idiosyncratic military memoir. 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.The humor is pithy and nearly constant, but there's a good look into what was happening in Britain in the early days of World War II, which is entirely different from the picture most of us have of the US during the same period, since beyond Pearl Harbor, none of us had to worry about the major enemy forces attacking us personally every day.