Band of Scholars

Band Of Scholars is the story of four student scholars from Keble College, Oxford who in 1941/42 were given permission to defer their military service for a year to complete 3 terms of study before being called up. Between the four of them they were part of the most significant battles that British forces were involved in from Alamein in 1942 to the crossing of the Rhine in March 1945. The academic elite of their age, they weren't the swagger stick officer martyrs of the First World War but part of a generation who wanted to do their bit in a just war. Equally, they wanted to come back and get on with their lives afterwards. Kenneth Parsons was among the first Allied soldiers parachuted into Normandy in the early hours of D-Day, with the intelligence section of the 8th Parachute Battalion. Kenneth Ingham, one of the youngest majors in the British Army, was wounded three times in the merciless jungle fighting of the Burma campaign. David Jones, as a junior artillery officer in the Guards Armoured Division, was witness to the joyous liberation of Brussels and the tragic disaster of Arnhem. John Zehetmayr, on board HMS Ulster Queen, used cutting edge radar technology to control Allied fighters over the Italian invasion beaches of Salerno and Anzio. Drawn from personal interviews, unpublished memoirs, diaries and regimental records, Band of Scholars shows how these four men were not just witnesses to, but active participants in, these momentous events. Their world was the radar room during an invasion, the company fighting alone in dense jungle, the artillery troop cut off from the regiment, the battalion intelligence section under daily rocket and mortar fire. They didn't know the bigger picture. It was lost in the chaos of battle, the isolation of jungle warfare or the hierarchy of Army bureaucracy. Now we do know that bigger picture, and we can put their experiences in the proper wider context that wasn't visible to them. This is the story of the Band of Scholars - a journey from the scholars' table at Keble College to a slit trench in Normandy and back.