In May 1942, Totnes resident Tom Payne joined the Royal Armoured Corps, receiving training in Churchill and Challenger tanks. Tanks were not to Tom's liking, so he later transferred to the Parachute Regiment. Tom had to complete six practice jumps from a balloon. By 6 June, however, he had only completed four jumps, so he was transferred to the 12th Battalion of the Devonshire Regiment. On the night of June 6, he and his comrades were dropped into France as part of the 6th Air Landing Brigade.

Tom was a member of Battalion Company A, because of a shortage of gliders, was the only man from the Devonshire Battalion to take part that night, with the rest of the battalion arriving in landing craft the following day. The task that night was to take the bridges over the River Orne and Caen Canal to protect the eastern flank of the D-Day landings. The bridge at Bénouville over the canal was secured by the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Regiment. The bridge was renamed Pegasus Bridge after the war, after the emblem of the airborne forces. Tom, along with A Company of the Devonshire Regiment and the Royal Ulster Rifles, secured the bridge at Ranville, which was 400 yards to the east. That bridge was later renamed Horsa Bridge, after the gliders that were used for the assault.

The battalion returned to the UK in September of that year by boat, sailing from Arromanches. Tom's only injury after three months of fighting was shrapnel in his leg. On Christmas Eve 1944, he was in the air again, this time flying to Belgium to support the Americans in the Battle of the Bulge. Tom continued to fight in Belgium and the Netherlands until the battalion returned home in February 1945. Within weeks, Tom was again dropped into Germany and was involved in a battle to capture the town of Hamminkeln, which is six miles across the Rhine. The battalion then fought their way to Wismar on the Baltic coast to rendezvous with the Russian Army.

In May 1945, Tom returned to the UK, and the Air Landing Brigade was disbanded in August 1945. The war, however, was not over for Tom. After a few weeks of leave, he was sent up to Scotland to join a ship sailing to India. After three weeks at sea, he arrived in Bombay. The Japanese had not surrendered at that time, so Tom was transferred to Malaya and given nine months of jungle warfare training. By the time he had completed his training, the bombs had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the Japanese had surrendered.

The army still didn't want Tom to go, so he was sent to Sumatra in Indonesia, where the British troops were fighting several rebel groups throughout 1946. Tom was finally tasked with escorting Japanese prisoners of war to the notorious Changi Prison Camp in Singapore, before finally setting sail for home in December 1946. Tom had at this point been married for five years and had seen his wife for just two weeks. Tom came to Totnes with his wife after being demobbed in 1947. He lived in the town for 70 years, worked for Dartington Plant, a subsidiary of Staverton Contractors, and was a caretaker at KEVICS for a few years. He passed away in 2014, and his funeral took place on 6 June 2014, 70 years after he had lost many others.