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. About then, in an attempt to impress girls at a gym, he slips a disc, whereupon he's hospitalised to determine whether he's faking. 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.

It starts with Milligan joining his regiment (56th Heavy Regiment Royal Artillery) late and immediately being singled out as a troublemaker. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.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.

And, a very credible evocation, of the life of a conscript at the start of the war right down to the smelliness of the army uniforms and how nobody got the correct size. Their band has been warned by an officer, that if they smuggle their instruments on board, the instruments will be thrown overboard. O. Major Chaterjack, Milligan meets an officer for whom he has great respect ("one who I would have followed anywhere").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. 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. 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. 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.

Like now I suppose but with the added knowledge that the person you were shagging might be dead tomorrow. And while at times I enjoyed that style, and had to laugh because of what I read, at other points it came across a little forces. But along the way Spike and his friends get involved in many amusing - and some not-so amusing - scrapes. 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.

The film is about Spike being drafted into the army at the beginning of WWII and covered his basic training. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others.