Mussolini:
His Part In My Downfall
(Memoires volume 4)
(Non fiction)
by Spike Milligan
1978
* * *
Clive James, in a review of one of mywar books, quoted it as ‘an unreliable history of the war’. Well, this makes him a thoroughly unreliable critic, because I spend more time on getting my dates and facts right than I did in actually writing. I admit the way I present it may seem as though my type of war was impossible and all a figment of a hyper-thyroid imagination, but that’s the way I write. But all that I wrote did happen, it happened on the days I mention, the people I mention are real people and the places are real. So I wish the reader to know that he is not reading a tissue of lies and fancies, it all really happened. I even got down to actually finding out what the weather was like, for every day of the campaign. I’ve spent a fortune on beer and dinners interviewing my old Battery mates, and phone calls to those members overseas ran into over a hundred pounds. Likewise I included a large number of photographs actually taken in situ, don’t tell me I faked them all, so no more ‘unreliable history of the war’ chat.
I want to thank the following for their help with documents, photographs, maps, recollections which are included in this volume: Major J. Leaman, Lt. S. Pride, Lt. C. Budden, B.S.M. L. Griffin, Sgt. F. Donaldson, the late Bombardier Edwards, Bombardier H. Holmwood, Bombardier S. Price, Bombardier A. Edser, Bombardier S. Kemp, L/Bdr. A. Fildes, Gunner ‘Jam-Jar’ Griffin, Bombardier D. Sloggit, L/Bdr. R. Bennett, Gunner J. Shapiro, Gunner H. Edgington, Gunner ‘Dipper’ Dye, Driver D. Kidgell, The War Museum Picture Library, Mrs Thelma Hunt, Mrs P. Hurren, all of whom have helped to give you this ‘unreliable history of the war’.
This volume ends up on a sad note, even for a born joker like me: the conflict caught up with me and I was invalided out of it. However, the rest of the book tells of what an unusual mob we were and have been ever since. The closeness of those years still exists in as much as we have two reunions a year, something no other British Army unit have. This book is a dedication to the spirit and friendship of ‘D’ Battery, 56th Heavy Regiment, Royal Artillery.
S. M.
Bayswater
March 1978
Salerno
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, 1943
MY DIARY:
STILL AT WAR! EARLY CLOSING IN CATFORD. READ LETTER FROM MOTHER SAYING CHIESMANS OF LEWISHAM ARE SO SHORT OF STOCK, THE MANAGER AND STAFF SIT IN THE SHOP MIMING THE WORDS ‘SOLD OUT’.
Dear Reader, the beds in the Dorchester Hotel are the most comfortable in England. Alas! neither Driver Kidgell nor Lance-Bombardier Milligan are in a bed at the Dorchester—no! they are trying to sleep on a 10-ton Scammell lorry, parked on the top deck of 4,000-ton HMS Boxer, inside whose innards are packed 19 Battery, 56th Heavy Regiment, all steaming in the hold; from below comes the merry sound of men retching and it’s all from Gunner Edgington. We are bound for Sunny Salerno. For thirteen days since the 5th Army landing, a ferocious battle had ensued on the beach-head. Even as we rode the waves we knew not what to expect when our turn came. The dawn comes up like Thinder. Thinder? Yes, that’s Thin Thunder. “Shhhhhh,” we all shout. The chill morning air touches the khaki somnam-bulists sleeping heroically for their King and Country. We are awakened by Gunner Woods in the driving cab, who has fallen asleep on the motor horn. A puzzled ship’s Captain is wondering why he can hear the sound of a lorry at sea. Kidgell gives a great jaw-cracking yawn and that’s him finished for the day. He stretches himself but doesn’t get any longer. Deep in his eyes I see engraved the word, ‘TEA’. “Wakey wakey,” he said, but didn’t. The ship is silent. The helmsman’s face shows white through the wheel house.
HMS Boxer, which landed us at Salerno. This picture was taken after the war, when she’d been converted to a Radar Ship.
“It is Dawn,” yawns Kidgell. “My watch says twenty past,” I yawned. “Yes! It’s exactly twenty past Dawn,” he yawned. We yawned. Like a comedy duo, we both stand and pull our trousers on; mistake! he has mine and vice versa. The light is growing in the Eastern sky, it reveals a great grey convoy of ships, plunging and rising at the dictation of the sea. LCTs. LCTs, some thirty of them, all flanked by navy Z-Class destroyers. The one on our port bow is stencilled B4. Imagine the confusion of a wireless conversation with it.
“Hello B4, are you receiving me?”
PAUSE
“Hello B4 answering.”
PAUSE
“Hello B4, why didn’t you answer B4?”
“Because we didn’t hear you before.” In the early light the sea is blue-black like ink. Kidgell is carefully folding his blankets into a mess, “I haven’t slept that well for years.”
“How do you know?” I said. “You were asleep.” He chuckled, “Well it feels like I slept well.”
“Where did you feel it, in the legs? the elbows? teeth?” I was determined to pursue the matter to its illogical conclusion; I mean if sane people are going around saying ‘I slept well last night’, what would lunatics say? ‘I stayed awake all night so I could see if I slept well’? I mean—we are interrupted by the shattering roar of aircraft!! “Spitfires!” someone said, and we all got up again.
“Thank God they weren’t German,” says Kidgell. “Why thank him,” I said. “He doesn’t run the German air force, thank Hitler.”
“Alright, clever Dick.” He giggled. “This is going to sound silly—thank Hitler they weren’t Germans.”
The helmsman’s face showed white through the wheel house.
I produce a packet of Woodbines. I offer one to Kidgell. I have to…he’s got the matches. My watch says 12.20; that means it’s about seven o’clock. We stow our gear into a lorry full of sleeping Gunners with variable pitch snoring; three of them are snoring the chord of C Minor. We decide to walk ‘forrard’. The Boxer makes a frothy swathe as her flat prow divides the waters. The sky is turning into post-dawn colours—scarlet, pink, lemon. It looked like the ending of a treacly MGM film where John Wayne joins his Ghost Riders in the sky. (Personally I can’t wait for him to.) It’s chilly; we wear overcoats with the collars up. Kidgell looks pensively out towards Italy.
“I was wondering about the landing.”
“Don’t worry about the landing, I’ll hoover it in the morning.”
He ignored me, but then everybody did. “I’ve been thinking.”
“Thinking? This could mean promotion,” I said.
“I was thinking, supposing they land us in six foot of water.”
“Then everyone five foot eleven and three quarters will drown.”
“That’s the end of me, then.”
“I thought you were a champion swimmer!”
“You can’t swim in Army Boots.”
“You’re right, there is not enough room.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about ten words to the minute.”
A merry matelot approaches with a Huge Brown Kettle. “You lads like some cocoa?”
We galloped at the speed of light to our big packs and returned to meet the merry matelot as he descended from the Bridge. He pours out the thick brown remaining sludge. The gulls in our wake scream as they dive-bomb the morning garbage. We sip the cocoa, holding the mug with both hands to warm them. A change from holding the mug to warm the Naafi tea. Another cigarette, what a lunatic habit! “Here we are,” I said. “We go to these bastards who make this crap and we say ‘We will give you money for twenty of those fags’, we smoke them, we make the product disappear I Ha! Supposing you bought a piano on the same basis? Suddenly, in
the middle of a concert it disappears, you have to belt out and buy another one to finish the concerto. It’s lunacy.”
In the deck-house, a red-faced officer scans the horizon ahead. “I wonder exactly where we are,” says Kidgell.
“I think we’re on the ancient sea of Tyrrhenum Sive Inferum.” That finishes him.
“When we reach Sicily we will hug the coast to afford us air cover and the way things are, I’d say we could just afford it.”
We are travelling one of the most ancient trade routes in history, Carthaginians, Greeks, Romans, Mamelukes, Turks and Mrs Doris Hare. “Fancy us being part of history,” I said. “I don’t fancy it,” said Kidgell.
The Tannoys crackle. “Attention, please.”
A Gunner faints. “What’s up?” we ask.
“I thought I heard someone say please.”
“Attention…This is the Captain speaking…(What a good memory he had)…In three minutes the Ack-Ack guns will be firing test bursts…this is only a practice, repeat, practice.”
Soon the sky was festooned with erupting shells, black puffs of smoke with a red nucleus from the barrels of the multiple Pom Poms. The Tannoy again.
“Hello this is your—” a burst of amplified coughing follows.
“It’s the resident consumptive,” I said.
The coughing ceases. “Attention, that practice firing will be repeated every morning at—” Coughing—coughing—“at”—coughing…
The helmsman’s face showed white through the wheel house..
“I feel a sudden attack of roll-call coming on,” I said.
I was right. Sgt. King lines us up on deck. We answer our names and anyone’s that isn’t there; even if they called “Rasputin” a voice answers “Sah.”
“Milligan?”
“Sah!”
“Devine?”
“Sah!”
“Edgington?…Edgington?”
From the deck below comes a weak voice “Sah!” followed by retching.
Britannia rules the waves, but in this case, she waives the rules. A roar of engines, the Spitfires return, we all get up again. They repeat roaring back and forth through the day, we get used to it, we get so used to it that when a Focke Wolfe shoots us up, we’re all standing up, aren’t we? Breakfast is happening in the galley.
“I have been a slave to breakfast all my life but breakfast and a galley slave never!” says Kidgell.
We lined up head on to a trio of Navy cooks, who doled out Spam Fritters, Bread, Marge, Jam and Tea and avoided looking at it when they did. We ate on top deck enjoying the sea breeze, the pleasant weather…were we really going to war or were we on our way to Southend for the day? As Kidgell is licking his mess-tin clean the klaxons go, submarine scare! Immediately the destroyers start circling, gun crews scramble to their mounts, the barrels trained down…A false alarm! Curses! I wanted to see the Greeny wake as the missile raced from the U-boat, a sneer on the German Captain’s lips, “Take zat, Englander.” On the bridge of HMS Dauntless, Lt. Wynford-Beaumont-Plague turned his trim little craft towards the black periscope. “Full speed ahead.” The words came through clenched teeth and fists. Too late, the Germans suddenly see the bows of the British destroyer slice through the conning tower, splitting the Kaiser’s picture into a thousand fragments. “We didn’t even get a depth charge,” says Kidgell.
“My God,” I said, “is there a charge on depth now?”
A long green groaning thing is approaching. The identity tags say ‘Edgington. 953271 C of E.’
“Was that a Jerry sub?” he said.
“No, it was a false alarm,” I said.
“Oh dear,” he moaned, “I wanted something to cheer me up.”
He managed a wry smile, opened a tin marked ‘Emergency Chocolate Ration’, and took out a cigarette; never a stingy one he offered them round. The fact there was only one in the tin left much to be desired. I desired it so I took it.
“You sod,” he said. We shared it.
“You feeling any better?” I asked.
He groaned, “Argggggg. I’m no bloody good at sea.”
“But you’re always at sea, Harry.”
“I’ve missed me bloody breakfast.”
“We’ve just had breakfast, and believe me, you haven’t missed anything.”
Edgington’s empty stomach rumbles loudly. “Spitfires,” shouts Kidgell. We all get up again.
“What was for breakfast?” he said.
“We don’t know,” I said. “There’s a court of enquiry this afternoon.”
Mid-day, the sun is out, it’s that perfect temperature, not hot not cold, like Naafi tea.
SEPTEMBER 23, EVENING
MY DIARY:
SIGHTED NORTH WEST TIP OF SICILY!
If my geographical recollections were right, that would be Capo San Vito. It wasn’t. In the evening light inland mountains seemed made of purple mist; on the sea was a green-grey seafret; to the primitive mariner it must have given birth to legends, to Gunner Liddel it gave forth to “I wonder what’s for dinner.” He watches a destroyer’s evasive zig-zag course. “Driver must be pissed,” he says.
He’d been a regular for eleven years and had risen to the rank of Private. He was sweating on being downgraded, I didn’t think he could be, from where he was the only way was up. He had two great bunions on his feet, mind you, he didn’t think they were great. They had promised to downgrade him 2B. I approached him, struck a Hamlet-like pose and said, “2B or not 2B.” He tried to throw me overboard.
“It’ll be my luck to get killed and next day it’ll come through downgraded to 2B.”
“That would be terrible,” I said, “being killed is bad enough, but to be a corpse and 2B as well, that’s too much.”
The Cocoa-Pot Matelot introduces himself. He was Eddie Hackshaw and from what I hear, still is, a short squat London lad with a cheery smile. He has taken a fancy to me. He gave me a silver Arab ring for luck. He troops Kidgell,
Edgington and self down to see the engine-room. We meet the engineers, they are embalmed in oil and grease, all Liverpudlians.
“These are the Whackers who do the engines,” he said.
“Ah, the famous Do-Whacker-dos.” (Groans.)
They had been working long hours since ‘D’ day, and looked desperately tired.
“It was bloody murder, two of our lads were killed on deck by Jerry artillery!”
We sat at their mess table, which was a mess.
“We haven’t had time to scrub it since we did the landings.”
We sat and talked, they gave us tea, grub, and handfuls of fags. A Big Liverpudlian, as I remember his name was Paul, said, “Did youse know the anagram of Salerno was ‘Narsole’?”
“I thought it was the other way round.”
The face of the helmsman showed white through the wheel house. Lunch was a mangled stew, lumps of gristle floating on the surface. Edgington said if you held your ear to it you could hear an old lady calling “Helppppp.”
The curtain of night is falling as we pass Argonaut-like in the shadow of Sicily. The sun, like a scarlet Communion host, dips into a horizon that is gossamer with mist; the wave-tops catch the last pink fading light, and reflect like a million flashing indicators. The night comes: we heard the Tannoy.
“This is the Captain speaking, there will be no naked lights, matches or cigarettes during hours of darkness. We are travelling through a known U-boat area. Will all officers ensure this order is carried out?”
Dinner was lunch four hours later and several degrees colder. I went below and Hackshaw scrounged me a bottle of beer.
“Where you been?” says Kidgell.
“In the galley.”
He leaps up, grabbed his mess-tins. “Is there more grub there, then?” he said, saliva pouring down his chin like Pavlov’s dogs.
It may be an illusion but night seemed to make the sea sound louder and lovelier. It even made Kidgell sound louder added. “It’s not doing the Warspite any good either.”
>
Lorries and guns coming ashore at Red Beach, Salerno. Note the man in the foreground with two broken forearms—now going for broken legs to get his ticket.
In the morning mistiness we make out hyper-activity on the beaches—lorries, tanks, half-tracks, beach-masters waving flags, pointing, lifting, lowering, signalling, shouting—all involved in the logistics of the war. The shells from Warspite were bursting inland on the hills behind Pontecagnano, which dominated the landing beaches. Why wasn’t Jerry replying? We drop anchor; immediately trouble, the chain has wrapped around the propeller shaft, fun and high jinks. We cheer as a diver goes down. A boat from the beach approached with a purple-faced Officer who shouted rude things through a bull-horn at our Captain, whose face incidentally showed white through the wheel house. To make it more difficult for our Captain, the destroyers lay a smoke-screen around us, and the Tannoy crackles: “Hello—click-buzz-crackle—it’s—click-buzz-crackle—later.” End of message.
“It’s all getting a bit silly,” said Harry. “All we had was the view and now that’s been bloody obscured!”
Now is the time for action! I take my trumpet from its case. There must be men still alive who remember the sound of ‘The Last Post’ from the smoke-shrouded Boxer. The Tannoy crackles.
“Whoever is playing that bugle, please stop,” said a piqued Navy voice.
Salerno. 200 soldiers and sailors watch a lone black soldier pushing a lorry up the beach.
The anchor chain is finally freed. The smoke-screen lifts to show we are now facing away from the beach.
“They’re takin’ us back again,” says Gunner Devine.
“Of course not, you silly Gunner, no, the Captain has turned his ship around in the smoke to show us how clever he is.”
There are laconic cheers as the diver surfaces.
“Caught any fish?” someone says.
He holds up two fingers.
“Is that all?”
The engines start up again, the ship swings slowly round and points toward Italy, I mean he couldn’t miss it. Sub-Section Sergeants are going around telling us to “Get ready to disembark.” Drivers are unchaining the restraining cables that secure the vehicles to the deck. The day is now a delightful mixture of sun and a cool wind. The Warspite lets off another terrifying salvo. It thunders around the bay. We watch it erupt among the hills.