page_title: Spike Milligan
section_title: Second World War
hierarchical_section_title: Spike Milligan / Second World War
caption_attribution_description: English: The British Army in Italy 1943 7.2-inch gun and Scammell tractor of 18/56th Heavy Regiment, Royal Artillery, negotiating a narrow corner in the 46th Division sector, 23 December 1943.
context_page_description: Terence Alan "Spike" Milligan KBE was a British-Irish actor, comedian, writer, poet and playwright. The son of an Irish father and an English mother, Milligan was born in India, where he spent his childhood, relocating to live and work the majority of his life in the United Kingdom. Disliking his first name, he began to call himself "Spike" after hearing the band Spike Jones and his City Slickers on Radio Luxembourg.
  Milligan was the co-creator, main writer and a principal cast member of the British radio programme The Goon Show, performing a range of roles including the Eccles and Minnie Bannister characters. He was the earliest-born and last surviving member of the Goons. Milligan parlayed success with the Goon Show into television with Q5, a surreal sketch show credited as a major influence on the members of Monty Python's Flying Circus.
  Milligan wrote and edited many books, including Puckoon and a seven-volume autobiographical account of his time serving during the Second World War, beginning with Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall. He also wrote comical verse, with much of his poetry written for children, including Silly Verse for Kids.
context_section_description: During most of the late 1930s and early 1940s, Milligan performed as an amateur jazz vocalist and trumpeter before, during and after being called up for military service in the fight against Nazi Germany, but even then he wrote and performed comedy sketches as part of concerts to entertain troops. After his call-up, but before being sent abroad, he and fellow musician Harry Edgington (1919–1993) (whose nickname 'Edge-ying-Tong', inspired one of Milligan's most memorable musical creations, the "Ying Tong Song") would compose surreal stories, filled with puns and skewed logic, as a way of staving off the boredom of life in barracks. One biographer describes his early dance band work as follows: "He managed to croon like Bing Crosby and win a competition: he also played drums, guitar and trumpet, in which he was entirely self taught"; he also acquired a double bass, on which he took lessons and would strum in jazz sessions. Milligan had perfect pitch.
  During the Second World War, Milligan served as a signaller in the 56th Heavy Regiment Royal Artillery, D Battery (later 19 Battery), as Gunner Milligan, 954024. The unit was equipped with the obsolete First World War era BL 9.2-inch howitzer and based in Bexhill on the south coast of England. Milligan describes training with these guns in part two of Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall, claiming that, during training, gun crews resorted to shouting "bang" in unison as they had no shells with which to practise.
  The unit was later re-equipped with the BL 7.2-inch howitzer and saw action as part of the First Army in the North African campaign and then in the succeeding Italian campaign. Milligan was appointed lance bombardier and was about to be promoted to bombardier, when he was wounded in action in the Italian theatre at the Battle of Monte Cassino. Subsequently, hospitalised for a mortar wound to the right leg and shell shock, he was demoted by an unsympathetic commanding officer (identified in his war diaries as Major Evan "Jumbo" Jenkins) back to Gunner. It was Milligan's opinion that Major Jenkins did not like him, because Milligan constantly kept up the morale of his fellow soldiers, whereas Jenkins's approach was to take an attitude towards the troops similar to that of Lord Kitchener. An incident also mentioned was when Jenkins had invited Gunners Milligan and Edgington to his bivouac to play some jazz with him, only to discover that the musicianship of the gunners was far superior to his own ability to play the military tune "Whistling Rufus".
  After hospitalisation, Milligan drifted through a number of rear-echelon military jobs in Italy, eventually becoming a full-time entertainer. He played the guitar with a jazz and comedy group called The Bill Hall Trio, in concert parties for the troops. After being demobilised, Milligan remained in Italy playing with the trio but returned to Britain soon after. While he was with the Central Pool of Artists (a group he described as composed "of bomb-happy squaddies") he began to write parodies of their mainstream plays, which displayed many of the key elements of what would later become The Goon Show (originally called Crazy People) with Peter Sellers, Harry Secombe and Michael Bentine.
caption: A Scammell Pioneer tows a howitzer of 18 Battery, 56th Heavy Regiment in Italy, 23 December 1943
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