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

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

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

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Price: £4.995
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Since my copy of Spike Milligan’s Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall is on Kindle and to get it out of the way there are some nice drawings throughout the book and they do not show well on a Kindle Viewer. My Dad was a massive fan and yet I can't believe I've never had Spike Milligan in my own life before now.

That said, Adolf Hitler: My Part in his Downfall ends just as Spike's regiment arrives in Algiers for its first taste of action and, whilst there is some tragedy in this memoir, things will inevitably get more serious from here on in. 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. 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.Luckily I was in the man cave whilst my other half slept like Tutankhamun's long-dehydrated corpse in the next room. 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. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others.

I'm actually not entirely sure how many volumes of this I read the first time around but I'm pretty sure it wasn't all seven. Spike brings his trademark manic eye to bear on his own experiences as a gunner in World War II and, while some of the events are tragic (obviously) you still barely get a chance to breathe between laughs.The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. We were issued with an air-mail letter, in which we were allowed to say we'd arrived safe and sound.

He wrote seven short books about the experience based on his diaries, here's the first one which concerns joining the army, training, starting a jazz band during training, more training, exploits/hijinks/affairs, and finally getting shipped off to Northern Africa, where the book ends. 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. Milligan, Edgington and others start to dress like the characters, fashioning clubs and running into the woods shouting gibberish. In some ways I think Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall, makes for a reasonable follow up to the serious Sword of Honor trilogy by Evelyn Waugh.Most of it is a humorous look at Spikes war experience and it had some serious sides to it along with the humour. 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. O. Major Chaterjack, Milligan meets an officer for whom he has great respect ("one who I would have followed anywhere"). A shell from World War I is eventually found and they make strenuous attempts to fire it for practice. Another reviewer speaks of having to look up the regular use of British Army Initials, (RSM is Regimental Sergeant Major, about as close to God as a new recruit is likely to get).



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