YMMV / Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall

• Angst? What Angst?: In Goodbye Soldier, Spike spends pages after pages on his passionate love affair with Italian ballerina Toni, who he regards as his first great love. The book ends with his return to England, although he's still in love with her and plans to go back to Italy to see her as often as he can. In the next book, he's still thinking about her but when he gets a chance to go back and see her, she's rather distant and tells him that she doesn't think he can provide her with stability, so they seem to break up—he isn't even sure if they have done. But he shrugs this off almost immediately, and thereafter sleeps with every available girl he can persuade into bed.
• Cargo Ship: Played for laughs in-universe when a very wet Gunner Edgington squeezes into Spike's lorry and asks if there's anything on the wireless. The radio batteries are flat, so Spike offers the next best entertainment he can provide: he turns on the windscreen wipers.
  He watched the blades sweep the rain from the glass. 'Ooooohh,' he groaned in ecstasy. 'What other Army can give you perversions like this.'
• Nightmare Fuel: The "Trauma" sequences from "Rommel?" "Gunner who?", descriptions of particularly horrific nightmares Milligan had during the war, and are as horrible as you'd expect from actual nightmares of a soldier in a warzone. Possibly the worst was the one where he dreams he's run down by a German tank which crushes him from the feet up, ending with him vomiting his own entrails before he suddenly wakes up.
• Values Dissonance/ Fridge Horror: "The girl, still in a sexual coma, was given Devine's rifle to hold while he terminated her contract." There's really only one way of reading what it means in context. Might have been funny for some in the mid-seventies.
  • Much of the memoirs suffer from severe Values Dissonance in the 21st century, with the generally obnoxious and laddish behaviour the lads get up to, but then it was World War II and they were very young. In the above example, there is in fact more than one way to read the passage: if the girl had literally been in a coma, she would not have been able to hold a rifle.
  • Zig-zagged to the point of whiplash in Peace Work: at one point, while touring in Switzerland, Spike reflects that it's a lovely country because there are no "bloody immigrants" causing "racial tension", while only a few pages later he's marvelling at the grace, charm and skill of a gay black male dancer in their touring troupe.