‘Hurry up, shouted Bombardier Fuller, ‘We’re keeping Adolf waiting.’
(Monty: His Part in My Victory, page 118)

In my reviews of the previous volumes of Spike’s war memoirs I’ve pointed out that the humour relies mostly on quickfire gags based on terrible puns and verbal quibbles.

Edgington squeezed in.
‘Anything on the wireless?’ he said.
‘No, the batteries are flat.’
‘I thought they were square,’ he said. (p.14)

In this short 127-page book there are:

• about 73 photos, usually with facetious and comic captions added
• Spike’s own cartoons (which I find very poor)
• some sketches of the scenery
• photocopies of official documents
• a copy of the running order at a musical review his jazz band took part in

I.e. a lot of the space is taken up with visuals, so that maybe only half the space is actual text. Here’s a typical photo-plus-comic caption:

‘A British soldier with an incredible weapon’

Then there are the bloody awful Hitlergrams, a potentially great idea which he invented in the first book – spoof conversations involving Hitler which punctuate the text – but which are consistently unfunny:

Hitlergram No. 96133a

HITLER: Mein Gott, zey are smoking our fags! Zat is terrible.
EVA BRAUN: I know. I’ve smoked them.
HITLER: To get our fags to Tunis ve have to go through Allied Air Raids on zer Factories! bombs on zer Railways! zer boats to Africa are torpedoed and zer fags end up being smoked by zat Huddersfield Schit Gunner White!
EVA BRAUN: It’s not right and it’s not fair.
HITLER: Vot isn’t.
EVA BRAUN: Zer left leg of Joe Louis.
HITLER: I don’t vish to know zat, kindly leave the stage. (p.41)

There’s an almost complete absence of the genuinely comic, of entire scenes or comic threads cleverly worked out over an extended length. Comedy is something to do with the overall arc or structure of a narrative: good comic stories build up tension, including details which add to this, before the big comic punchline or reveal. The great comic novels are comic in structure and form as well as details (I’m thinking of the brilliantly humorous war novels of Evelyn Waugh – ironically, as Spike for some reason hated Waugh and singled him out for scathing abuse).

Anyway, there’s almost none of that careful structuring here, no extended comic scenes; instead it’s  a daily diary packed with a rat-a-tat barrage of thin puns and verbal gags.

The cookhouse waggon was missing. ‘I don’t miss it at all,’ said Gunner White. (p.71)

Diary format and sources

The memoirs are based on authentic sources: on the diaries of Spike, some of his friends (notably Driver Alf Fildes), the official war diary of the regiment he served with, and of the specific battery, and letters and journals of some of his mates in the regiment (‘wonderful comrades who made life worthwhile’). These have been compiled into a fairly basic chronological, day-by-day account, enlivened by as many cheap gags as Spike can cram in, with no attempt at perspective or analysis such as you’d get in a proper history. Instead gags gags gags.

I picked up a faint German broadcast of a very corny band playing old Jack Hylton arrangements. The singer, could I ever forget his name! – Ernst Strainz! His vibrato sounded like he was driving a tractor over ploughed fields with weights tied to his scrotum. (p.21)

Its predecessor, the Rommel book, featured short inserted passages utterly bereft of humour, in which Spike the victim of nervous breakdown and mental illness, looks back on those wartimes from the time of writing (i.e. the mid-70s), unhappy, lonely, afflicted by his memories, especially of the men he loved who died. Nothing funny at all about them, sad and lowering. There’s none of those here, but the bad taste lingers.

Here’s a typical Spike cartoon, illustrating the notion that you could identify the men from their distinctive boots. It’s a vaguely OK idea, a sort of OK execution, maybe raises a smile, but…

Timeline

Volume 3 covers from the fall of Tunis until Spike’s regiment embarked for the Salerno landings in Italy, from 7 May 1943 to 22 September 1943 = 5 months. The fighting – described in sometimes hair-raising detail in the Rommel book – is over, and the boys are mostly bored or very bored.

Just a reminder that Spike is a Bombardier in 19 or D Battery, the 56th Heavy Regiment, the Royal Artillery.

As they drive through the new camp Spike and his mates are amazed at the number of Italian and German prisoners of war, often stopping to cadge fags and, on one occasion, whiskey off them.

As in the previous books, the ordinary soldiers are obsessed with getting pissed and getting laid. ‘Plunger’ Bailey (named after his big willy) sets up a shagging scoreboard.

We learn that Spike’s dad was obsessed with Westerns, owned a number of old pistols and liked to kick open doors and duck behind tables as if in a shootout in the movies. One of the two things that made me laugh in the entire book was Spike describing watching from his bedroom window Crystal Palace burn down in a great inferno (30 November 1936) his dad, next to him, watched it through binoculars, eventually putting it down and saying, expressively: ‘Navajo!’

Spike’s Catholic mum sends him packages containing holy medals, rosaries etc. His commanding officer, Major Chater Jack, asks if she can send one of her yummy fruit cakes. When there’s spotted dick for pudding at the canteen, it’s hard to tell the flies from the raisins.

They find a Stuka standing alone in a piece of scrub, one of them accidentally starts the engine and propellor and none of them know how to turn it off.

They take part in army exercises and training. They go into Tunis to try out the bars and brothels. They climb a ruined Roman aqueduct and get stuck half way up (cue a Spike cartoon).

There’s a victory parade in Tunis, with generals galore taking the salute including Eisenhower (cue a couple of photos).

They’re ordered to move to a new camp, at Hammam Lif, a seaside town just outside Tunis. Cue as many excursions for beach swimming as they can manage…

With three mates Spike takes several days to drive into the desert to see the ruins of Carthage, with moderately soulful stuff about sitting out under the stars, boiling tins of rations in a billy over a fire, laughing and joking, it’s all a long way from Bromley. In fact sleeping out under the stars at night, and stopping driving along some coast road to simply strip off and run into the sea and try to stand on each others’ shoulders, you can see why these are lovely, bittersweet memories. ‘We were as free as we’d ever be in our lives…’ (p.62)

They’re ordered to move camp to a place called Ain Abessa (p.71).

2 to 6 June 1943. They drive to the beautiful Kerrata Gorge, camp, explore, spend a day climbing up the mountainside, another going on a fruitless pig hunt, led by local Arabs, notable for their prodigious farting (‘Christ, no wonder the Crusaders lost!’ said Jordy Dawson, p.76), before gorging on sausages and wine by a camp fire. Memorable days. On the last day they go swimming in a mountain stream, giving rise to the typically tinny piece of doggerel:

It’s chilly
On your willy
In the water
At Kerrata

Their CO suggests that Spike’s jazz band, such as it is, plays a concert for the mayor of Setif, a dire occasion held at the Salle de Fête. His mate, Gunner Edgington, ‘called it a Fête worse than death’ (p.82). Thin stuff, eh?

The other thing that made me laugh was when Spike and his band are ordered to play in an ENSA (Entertainments National Service Association) concert at the camp of the 74 Mediums (presumably a regiment) and arrive to be greeted a captain who explains that he’d like them to play in the miggle of the show.

The miggle of the show? He definitely said miggle – so he couldn’t pronounce his d’s. ‘How woulg you like to be announeg?’
I paused. ‘D Battery Dance Duo and Doug on Drums.’ (p.83)

Another member of the troupe is an enormous opera singer, Mlle Beth Villion, with an enormous bust.

We listened spellbound as she sang the Habanera from Carmen, her voice was pure silver. In the war, African night it was an unforgettable experience, with the moon shining down on those lovely white boobs. She stopped the show but then she would have stopped anything. (p.85)

As in the previous two books, it’s music which provides solace and escape, not only from the war and the rough philistine squaddies but even, you suspect, from himself and the demons inside his head. Warmed up by Mlle Villion I also laughed at his description of a dire audition he attended, years earlier, back in Blighty, when he watched in disbelief a series of soldiers trying to impress by: playing the spoons whistling Rhapsody in Blue, walking on their hands, doing cartwheels, somersaults, and one soldier who thought he’d get a slot falling on his back.

‘Is that all?’ said the officer.
‘Yes sir, it takes it out of you.’ (p.87)

It’s amazing that England had any entertainment industry at all, and made me think that even then, most of the best stuff was all imported from America: the jazz Spike loves to pieces is entirely American and his squaddie mates talk only of American movies and their stars.

22 June 1943. They’ve joined a large Navy, Army and Air Force Institutes (NAAFI) camp on the beautiful Ziama Bay and have a lovely day swimming, sunbathing and eating but that night a sirocco hits the camp with 100 mph winds blowing sand in everyone’s faces, blowing tents and equipment out to sea, sending the men running to hole up in the cabs of the trucks.

Some of the men are fishing using hand grenades and a dead 7-foot hammerhead shark comes to the surface. Spike is curious and barters a slice of it with Major Chater Jack in exchange for a promise of his mum’s fruitcake. But in the event:

To duplicate the taste of a hammerhead shark, boil old newspapers on Sloan’s Liniment. (p.91)

Their CO, Major Chater Jack, who understood what they’d been through and organised holidays and R&R to keep them out of mischief, is promoted away from the unit. He is replaced by Major Evan Jenkins who Spike loathes, calling ‘a real bastard’ and ‘a mean sod’ (p.91). He insisted on giving cultural lectures, as announced by an officious sergeant:

‘H’eyes front! Today the major will be talking about’ – here he consulted a piece of paper – ‘Keats, and I don’t suppose one of you higgerant bastards knows what a Keat is.’ (p.93)

Everyone hates his officious insistence on the rules. He makes them take their bootlaces out and iron them so they’re nice and flat. The cook gets revenge by mixing goat shit in with potatoes and flour to produce shit rissoles which the Major loves and asks for more. ‘Now he really is full of shit,’ says cook May (p.93).

Spike and his best friend, Edgington, have the bright idea of improving on the idea of a tent by rigging canvas over a wadi, more floor space, well ventilated…until there’s a flash flood in which they discover the dictionary definition of wadi and most of their gear is washed away.

Spike’s band was talent spotted at the ENSA show and is invited to play a bigger concert. He includes a photocopy of the running order or playbill and waxes lyrical about the joy of performing live.

You can’t describe a show, you have to be there at that time with that audience, that’s what makes it come alive and come alive it did… (p.98)

To his surprise his band is ordered to join the concert party on a tour of towns, all along the coast, so there is plenty of swimming during the day. At one place they find in the theatre props room a selection of plaster arms and legs which they take into the sea to fool around with, lots of silliness to impress a party of WRENS (Women’s Royal Naval Service) who are sunbathing nearby. Boys will be boys and puns will be puns:

Carter was a stickler for perfection so it was midnight before we finished. We were all dog tired and barked ourselves to sleep. (p.101)

When his mate gets knocked off a diving board and, as he falls, curls up protectively, he enters the water ‘foetus firstus’ (p.101). They sunbathe and get badly sunburned (I suppose this was before any kind of sun creams existed).

‘Cor, that sun’s hot,’ said Kidgell.
‘Well, you shouldn’t touch it,’ I said. (p.102)

See what I mean by snappy wordplay. Maybe, for the generation which saw Groucho Marx, this was wit:

From out of the sea came the sound of heavy guns.
‘Sounds like a naval engagement.’
‘I hope they’re both very happy,’ I said. (p.103 )

Mind you, Spike refers to the (very British) Crazy Gang in the text. I think you’d have to be familiar with the Crazy Gang and other popular comic acts of the 1930s to really understand the context of Spike’s humour. Read cold, now, 80 years after the event, is, I suppose, unfair. This becomes increasingly obvious as the final 30 or so pages dwell on this travelling revue, describing each night’s performance, analysing improvements, the evolution of the gags and turns, and so on.

Something sets him thinking about Christmas back in Blighty, at Bewhill (does he mean Bexhill? the text is full of typos and dubious punctuation) and the time a nice local lady’s dog ran into a minefield on the cliffs and got blown to smithereens.

The Concert Party that had toured Tunisian seaside towns during July is so popular it is revived for a few last shows in August. But then the good times come to an end and there’s a sudden blizzard of training and route marches. A week on artillery ranges revising their skills, they’re issued with a new type of wireless, taught new signal codes, had to adopt the American phonetics (A for Able instead of Ack, B for Baker instead of Beer etc).

8 September the amazing news that Italy has surrendered. Compare how this affected Eric Newby in his Apennine prisoner of war building and the Italians on Cephallonia in Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. Next day the Allies landed at Salerno but encountered stiff opposition from the Germans. Apparently it was Churchill’s idea to attack Germany via ‘the soft underbelly of Europe’ and it turned out to be nearly as disastrous as his idea of attacking Germany via Turkey in the previous war (p.120).

Spike makes the point that none of them realised how brutal the fighting at Salerno was; he only really found out when he read General Alexander’s biography in 1973, which was about 30 years too late! (p.117)

Spike and his battery are ordered to load up and proceed in convoy with their guns to an embarkation point back in Tunisia (this was a bit unclear to me; have they been in neighbouring Libya for the last sections?). Anyway, it means driving through the scenes of the brutal fighting back at the start of 1943, when artillery regiments like his suffered heavy losses. Burned out tanks and cemeteries.

They arrive at a vast American base, ranks of vehicles and munitions, outside Bizerta. They are issued Italian money and a booklet on the customs and language of Italy. Finally they realise they’re departing when they see the officers running round like blue-arsed flies, and line up in their vehicles to embark on ‘landing ships, tank’ or LSTs.

And the narrative ends with him lying atop a huge Scammell lorry overnight, with the ship still anchored, smoking fags and laughing with his mates about his last will and testament, joking about the ‘birds’ back home he’ll leave to them, and teeing us up for volume 4.

Monty

Despite being named in the title of the book, I don’t think there’s a single reference to Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery (1887 to 1976) anywhere in the actual text. There’s just one photo of him with four Chinese soldiers (?) with a typically ‘humorous’ caption reading: ‘General Montgomery wondering why he is surrounded by Chinese generals – as he neither drinks nor smokes’ (p.111).

Nature

Apart from music, the other thing which lights his soul is nature, which brings out a surprisingly poetic streak in the gag-meister:

22 May 1943. That evening, excited as schoolboys, we drove off along the Tunis-Bezerta road, it was as though the war didn’t exist, eventually we pull up on a sandy beach for the night.
There was no moon but the sky was a pin cushion of stars. Great swathes of astral light blinked at us across space. We made a fire, glowing scarlet in cobalt black darkness, showers of popping sparks jettisoning into the night air. (p.58)

This is so unlike Spike the joker that you wonder how much of these kinds of passages was written by his editor and collaborator Jack Hobbs, although even passages like this have the Spike clumsiness (‘jettisoning’). Or:

The beach was copper coloured, sunlight reflecting from the bottom gave the water a shimmering Caesar’s royal purple colour. (p.88)

Thoughts

Apparently Spike was needled that reviewers of the first in the series, ‘Adolf Hitler: My Part in his Downfall’, thought most of it was made up. This motivated him to emphasise the rock-solid truthfulness of his accounts in all the subsequent books, especially of the actual fighting in the Rommel book. Thus, I would say, over the course of the three books, there’s a tendency to rely more and more on these half dozen diaries, journals and other sources and the net effect of that is … to make it more boring. Despite the blizzard of gags the basic underlying structure is a simple day-to-day diary and this, accurate enough in its own terms, lacks any depth, any sense of a deeper narrative, any sense of the opening of themes at the beginning and their crafted resolution at the end.

Credit

Monty: His Part in My Victory by Spike Milligan was published by Michael Joseph in 1976. References are to the 1978 Penguin paperback edition.

Related reviews

• Adolf Hitler: My Part in his Downfall (1971)
• ‘Rommel?’ ‘Gunner Who?’: A Confrontation in the Desert (1974)
• Second World War reviews