Adolf Hitler: My Part In His Downfall – Spike Milligan, 1971 ★★½

Goon Goes to War

There’s nothing so tragic that laughter can’t be mined from it. Not even World War II.

Of course, a lot depends on who is doing the mining.

Back in the 1950s, Spike Milligan redefined comedy in Great Britain as a performer and lead writer on radio’s “The Goon Show.” Before all that, in 1940, Milligan took time out of his young life to help beat back the Nazi war machine, as a draftee in an artillery regiment.

The reception when he reported to his base was decidedly chilly:

“I suppose you know you are three months late arriving?”

“I’ll make up for it sir. I’ll fight nights as well!”

Terence Alan Milligan, better known as Spike. His flights of fancy in this memoir of wartime service never go as far as donning an enemy uniform as is the case here, but he happily managed to annoy his superiors anyway. Image from http://www.socialbookshelves.com/spike-milligan-adolf-hitler-my-part-in-his-downfall-review/.

Adolf Hitler: My Part In His Downfall covers the first three years of Milligan’s wartime service. Often surreal, sometimes sober, usually quite silly, the book is part-memoir, part-raspberry blown at the forces which not only conspired to put Milligan in harm’s way but risked boring him to death en route.

In fact, as one might guess from the title, Adolf Hitler is fairly light reading in the main. Milligan’s keen nostalgia and flair for description surprised me – being more aware of his reputation as a comedian’s comedian – but for the most part this is a joke-focused affair. Not every joke hits, but the ratio is respectable:

At Victoria Station the R. T. O. gave me a travel warrant, a white feather and a picture of Hitler marked “This is your enemy.” I searched every compartment, but he wasn’t on the train. At 4:30, June 2^nd, 1940, on a summer’s day all mare’s tails and blue sky we arrived at Bexhill-on-Sea, where I got off. It wasn’t easy. The train didn’t stop there…

Men in uniform can’t really be considered religious, unless it be a Christian profundity that makes a Gunner say Jesus Christ when he drops a shell on his foot…

We were going to war. Would I survive? Would I be frightened? Could I survive a direct hit at point blank range by a German 88 mm.? Could I really push a bayonet into a man’s body – twist it – and pull it out? I mean what would the neighbours say?

Well received upon publication, Milligan's memoir even spawned a film adaptation in 1973. In it, Jim Dale (on the left, with trumpet) plays Milligan as a young soldier, equally interested in making music and mayhem. Image from https://www.myreviewer.com/DVD/62500/Adolf-Hitler-My-Part-In-His-Downfall-UK/62516/Review-by-Rich-Goodman.

People who recall Milligan’s Goon Show antics will recognize the scattershot puns and amiable irreverence that runs through the memoir. Actually the first of seven memoirs Milligan published about his wartime service and early postwar life, Adolf doesn’t deliver much in the way of combat. Once a German plane flies over his base and sends Milligan and his mates scurrying for cover, but the most brutal combat depicted at any length is a game of rugby where Milligan’s side finds itself outmatched by “six hundredweight of steaming beef.”

Late in the memoir, one of Milligan’s comrades loses his hand trying to clear a jammed shell from a breech. The severed hand is buried with the suggestion someone give it a goodbye shake.

More often, the war serves as backdrop for young Milligan’s early sexual exploits:

As we approached Malpas Road a stick of three bombs fell about a half mile to our left, but they passed directly overhead and Lily and I lay down against a wall. While we were down there I tried to make love to her. “Don’t be a fool,” she said. “That was close,” she remarked. I’m not sure whether she referred to the bombs or me.

As amusing as moments like these are, Milligan’s episodic framework and his lack of a real story to tell does show after a while, even in what amounts to a book of less than 150 pages amply filled with illustrations. Basically he describes a lot of drudgery in an amusing but repetitive manner designed to showcase the stupidity of same. When he isn’t playing jazz or being assigned work detail, Milligan hasn’t much to talk about, which offers an excuse for another of his flights of fancy.

Adolf Hitler: My Part In His Downfall is filled with many Milligan sketches, some of which were repurposed for the jacket art of the later film's soundtrack. Image from https://eil.com/shop/moreinfo.asp?catalogid=692663.

For most readers, Hitler will prove an engaging skim. Two sets of readers may find more of interest.

First are Goon fans, people with a deep fondness for Milligan going in, who will likely enjoy his stories about the origins of his comedy writing as something he and a fellow jazz aficionado, Harry Edgington, did to amuse themselves on the base.

“[A]ny solider I thought was an idiot I called a Goon,” Milligan explains. “This was taken up by those with a like sense of humour.”

In fact, the town nearest Milligan’s base, Bexhill-on-Sea, later shows up as the wartime setting for one of the most famous of the Goon Shows, “The Dreaded Batter-Pudding Hurler.”

The other type of reader would be those interested in what life was like on the British home front during World War II. Milligan recalls the evacuation of Dunkirk as a distant onlooker along with most of his countrymen. “I don’t think the nation ever reached such a feeling of solidarity as in that week at any other time during the war,” he writes.

Later, Milligan recalls the Blitz of German bombers attacking the British capital for the first time:

We looked at the blaze and it seemed to be getting bigger. I think we all knew it was London. My mother, father and brother were there. I’m not sure how I felt. Helpless, I suppose.

London during the 1940 Nazi bombings. Milligan and his family survived these, but among the many casualties Mulligan notes the loss of his entire record collection, save one disc. He left it with a young friend whose home was destroyed. Image from https://www.bl.uk/20th-century-literature/articles/london-during-the-blitz-a-landscape-of-fear-and-shadows.

Mostly, though, Milligan’s humor remains at the forefront of this narrative, more concerned with the drudgery of Janker Wallahs [those assigned clean-up detail] and runs to the NAAFI for food and light entertainment.

Sometimes at dances a food fight breaks out. “Strawberry flan up the front of the jacket, apple strudel on the lower face, plus little blobs of cream on the epaulettes was something we found difficult to salute,” he writes.

The nature of military life did not agree with Milligan, to say the least. Getting into trouble proved all-too-frequent:

It’s not too difficult to become a military criminal. Not shaving, dirty boots, calling a sergeant “darling”, or selling your Bren Carrier. Any Sunday, down Petticoat Lane, you could find some of the lads selling lorries, jerrycans, bullets, webbing. “Git your luverly Anti-Aircraft Guns ‘ere.” It got so that Military Depots were shopping there for supplies.

Milligan's memoir was enough of a success to spawn six sequels, which covers the rest of Milligan's wartime service and more than one mental breakdown from same. The last was published in 1992, a decade before Milligan's death. Image from https://booko.com.au/9783200307322/The-Spike-Milligan-Collection-7-books-Peace-Work-Rommel-Gunner-Who-Mussolini-His-Part-in-My-Downfall-Where-Have-All-The-Bullets-Gone-Monty-His-Part-in-My-Victory-Adolf-Hitler-My-Part-in-His-Downfall-Goodbye-Soldier-.

Late in the book, Milligan finds himself on leave in London in uniform, getting odd looks from the other customers at a pub. Eventually he realizes he has been mistaken in his bandages for someone who had taken part in a recent Allied raid at Dieppe, which was in the news.

One old man offers him a whisky and for an hour or so Milligan shares stories about crawling to a pillbox while his new fan club looks on in gentle awe. “That night my mother put me to bed; for two hours I had been a hero, something I had never been before and would never be again,” he recalls.

Adolf Hitler is not a book about heroes, but it unapologetically offers up heroic virtues amid its mockery and pratfalls and keeps up an entertaining banter while slipping in a few hard truths. Milligan was funnier, but he was writing for more than that here. Sometimes it shows.