changing month in Mmm format to mm FORMAT

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

i have an variable mydate=2008Nov07

i want o/p as in variable mymonth=11 (i.e nov comes on 11 number month)
i want some command to do this for any month without using any loop.
plz help me

2

Something like this could work:

awk -v mon=$mon 'BEGIN { months="janfebmaraprmayjunjulaugsepoctnovdec";}  END { print int(index(months, tolower(mon))/3) + 1 }'