大象传媒

Anyone writing about WW2 must do it under the shadow of Spike Milligan, who invented the best title - 'My part in Hitler's downfall.'
I got into my first uniform hwne my new step-father sent me to boarding school to get me out of the house. I was drafted into the Scouts, and by the time I reached senior school i was expected to transfer to the Officer Cadet Corps. By then Franco and Guernica gave me pause for thought. i had a bright young Scoutmaster who taught Physics, and taught me about Bohr and Einstein and such although the exam syllabus still claimed that an atom was the smallest particle which could exist in a free state.
He promoted me to ASM to counter the threat of putting me in khaki, went off to the war in the Engineers, and became the Army's Director of Education.
By the time I was due for Belisha's conscription I managed to side-step into the RAFVR, still known as the week-end flying club. There I found that my predilection for flying fighters in defence did not preclude being given a bomber to attack. So I quickly graduated as "unlikely to become an efficiant pilot."
When I finished agricultural college at Bromsgove I was offered a good job in research, but it was cancelled by a telegram on the day Chamberlain declared war. So I got work as secratary to a large stock-breeding establishment on the Sussex coast. After seeing the troops coming back from Dunkirk and having a Messerschmidt open fire as it came low over my garden, I began to wonder whether we could win without my taking a bigger part.
My former colleagues were getting killed overhead in the Battle of Britain, pillboxes were being built for Dad's Army in the cornfields without waiting for harvest, and a very young subaltern presented me with a large bag of sugar. When I asked him what to do with it he said to put it in the petrol tanks when I got the password. When I asked him what the password was, he said "Don't be silly, that's secret".
So I set about getting a ginger suit. I was not allowed to change my job, so I fired myslef, and had to prove I was unemployed by signing on for the dole three days a week for six weeks. Goering's staff had organised Guernica, and advised him that bombs which didn't go off on impact were better at undermining civilian morale than ones which did. By Christmas I was in Liverpool docks with a bomb embroidered on my khaki sleeve to show my trade, and digging in the rubble.
We invented a new sport which I have not heard of being played elsewhere. A lot of the houses were four or five stories high, and some even had baths on the top floor. When we found one half-demolished, we used it as a variation on the Cresta Run. Two of us in the bath, the launcher swinging an axe to release it from the lead plumbing and we were off.
One of the menaces even then was 'friendly' fire. When we moved on to Bristol we had a house on Clifton Downs very like the ones we had played with, but undamaged. it too had a bath on the top floor, which we had been told not to use.
When I was in it one night there was a great crash and the large window joined me in the bath in small pieces. The light went out, and the blackout was also in pieces. I blamed the Luftwaffe for setting my long and difficult task of extricating myself from broken glass I could not see, but later discovered that the Navy had brought up two six-inch guns to reinforce the ack-ack. A few nights later the Luftwaffe blew me over in the main shopping street, and I came to with one of the most expensive pipes from Dunhill's window in my lap.
We were in London when Eisenhower was planning D-day. Our choice of canteen was the one run by the English Speaking Union, just across the way for his staff. We

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