Like the potentilly funny scene where Spike and his sargent are being chased by a bull but find out that it's really a cow. 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. 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. His mother is digging the air-raid shelter when Neville Chamberlain announces that Britain is at war with Germany.

It's not a bad book, and I can see why people like it, but I don't think I will be picking up the next books in the series any time soon. Like now I suppose but with the added knowledge that the person you were shagging might be dead tomorrow. Yes, that is what some of this book, the first in the series of wartime memoirs by celebrated British comedian Spike Milligan (who was, coincidentally, the inspiration for Monty Python in the first place with his group act 'The Goon Show'), would feel like: hilarious, anarchic, almost brutally sarcastic, bawdy and guaranteed to leave you in splits. 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.Yet, the wonder is that this book, even with its undeniably harsh truths, is so entertaining in the end. 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. Adolf Hitler: My Part in his Downfall, is the first of Spike Milligan's seven memoirs that recount his recollections of life in the army during World War 2. One of the gunners, however, loses a hand when a shell he is pushing into the howitzer's breach explodes. The cast had a lot of potential too, We have Arthur Lowe of Dad's Army playing a similar role as the base Commander.

The family response is for Spike, his father and brother to produce boyish drawings of war machines (the drawings are included in the book), which are taken to the War Office. I am amazed it took me so long to get around to reading Spike Milligan’s war memoirs, but I am truly glad that there are many more books to read. Milligan refers to his first commanding officer as "Leather Suitcase" for the numerous leather patches on his uniform. My Dad was a massive fan and yet I can't believe I've never had Spike Milligan in my own life before now. 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.

From the bizarre officer's dances Spike's band played at to the crazy antics they got up to when learning to work the radios--he was a radio operator--it's funny in a slightly crazed way.

The cover may have some limited signs of wear but the pages are clean, intact and the spine remains undamaged.

Simple yet effectively stirring and utterly believable because this was exactly how everybody felt in those days. 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. Roughly every third sentence is a joke, and most are good - sometimes, randomly, the horrors and insanity of his situation creeps in for a paragraph where he describes (without joking) how a fellow soldier died in an accident, or how decades later he visited the same place and cannot deal with the ghosts ('What’s happened to us all since then? Both begin with an England grossly unprepared for war and depending on outmoded traditions and building a tradition for muddling through.