Author: LeeDixon

Spike Milligan’s War Memoirs Series:

I remember my dad reading these books when I was a kid and laughing so hard it would bring tears to his eyes. So now I’ve found all 7 and are ready to cry with laughter..

Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall: Book 1

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 appendicitus, I thought’) and his gunner training in Bexhill (‘There was one drawback. No ammunition’) to the landing at Algiers in 1943 (‘I closed my eyes and faced the sun. I fell down a hatchway’).

Filled with bathos, pathos and gales of ribald laughter, this is a barely sane helping of military goonery and superlative Milliganese.

“Rommel?” “Gunner Who?”: Book 2

“Rommel?” “Gunner Who?”: A Confrontation in the Desert is Spike Milligan’s second volume of war autobiography, published in 1974, with Jack Hobbs credited as an editor. This book spans events from January to May 1943, during Operation Torch the Allied invasion of Morocco and Algeria and the Tunisia Campaign in World War II. (The preface to the earlier book states this would be a trilogy, but he wrote seven volumes.)

As before, the book is in an unusual format freely mixing multimedia formats, with narrative anecdotes, contemporaneous photography, ridiculously non-contemporaneous steel engravings and illustrations, excerpts from diaries, letters and rough sketches, along with absurd memoranda from Nazi officials (sometimes called “Hitlergrams”). A map is included.

Monty – His part in my victory: Book 3

Britain’s looniest war hero completes the third volume of the Milligan memoirs. The nineteenth battery forge into Tunis, cocksure and carefree. They climb an aqueduct with no trousers on (the battery that is; the aqueduct was very well-dressed). five hundred gunners try to dance with two girls and an old French matron …

Mussolini His Part In My Downfall: Book 4

Britannia rules the waves TA-RA, but on occasions she waives the rules and Spike is all set to liberate -gasp- Italy. In this fourth volume of war memoirs, Lance-Bombardier Milligan (Spike actually) continues his notorious sage of World War II – from the long remembered outbreak of crabs in monkey to the unfortunate ack-acking of and American killyhawk. Dio mio, is war is a game of cards, someone was cheating.

Where Have All The Bullets Gone: Book 5

Back to those haunting days in Italy in 1944, at the foot of Mount Vesuvius, with lava running in great red rivulets down the slope towards us, and Jock taking a drag on his cigarette and saying, “I think we’ve got grounds for a rent rebate.”‘

Where Have All the Bullets Gone? sees our hero dispatched from the front line to psychiatric hospital and from there to a rehabilitation camp. Considered loony (and ‘unfit to be killed in combat by either side’), he becomes embroiled in his own private battle with melancholy.

But it is music, wit and a little help from his friends – including one Gunner Harry Secombe – that help carry him through to his first stage appearances . . .

Goodbye Soldier: Book 6

In “Goodbye Soldier” the central pool of artists, now rechristened the combined services entertainment, complete with Gunner Milligan, now rechristened Lance-Bambardier, makes its way across Europe, via romantic Rome and verneral Venice, to Vienna where Spike continues to demoralize the troops from the stage despite frenzied protests from Eisenhower, Churchill and Stalin. Hastily discharged from the army in Austria, he returnes to naughty Naples for an interval of connubial bliss on Capri with Balerina. Maria Antoinette Fontana: ‘All except for Eva Maria who I was keeping in reserve’. Finally, farewell to Rome, goodbye soldier and the prospect of return to dreary deptford where ‘fortune, overdraft, income tax, mortgages, accounts, solicitors, house agents’ awaited.

Peace Work: Book 7

This volume of Spike Milligan’s memoires begins in 1946 when he leaves the army and returns to a drab London to resume his career as a band musician. Eventually after several tours entertaining the troops in Germany, he turns to script writing for radio, then teams up with some other lunatics including Harry Secombe and Peter Sellers who decide to call themselves “The Goons”.