How I Won the War

'Well, Sergeant, here we go then', I said. 'Getting our chance at last of a good old crack at the Boche, eh…?'

Ex-infantryman and reconnaissance officer, author and humorist Patrick Ryan is perhaps best remembered for this acerbically comic novel – first published in 1963 and quickly adapted into a 1967 feature film by Richard Lester, starring Michael Crawford and John Lennon. It is a satirical 'memoir' of the misadventures of the haphazard and notably naïve Lieutenant Ernest Goodbody and his fellow fighting men of Twelve Platoon – Sergeant Transom, Corporals Hink, Globe and Dooley, Private Drogue et al – as they stumble ill-preparedly into the theatres of World War Two.