South Yorkshire Times, August 26th 1944
Under Fire In Normandy
Working for 1½ hours on an open road, covered by German machine guns and mortars, after his section commander had been wounded. Cpl. Thomas Waters of 80, Cliffe View, Denaby Main, got a signals line through on D-Day to a forward battalion in the divisional area.
Cpl. Waters and his brigade commander were among the very first troops into Normandy. They jumped with the pathfinders who went in ahead of the rest of the division
One of the first jobs for the signalers was to get communication with the battalion that was gallantly holding a precarious bridgehead on the west of the Orne and Orne Canal bridges, the rest of the division being to the east of the river. A Corporal and his line party set off to lay a line across the bridges and the road linking them to the bridge head battalion,” said Cpl. Waters.
“The road was being sniped and mortared.” Cpl. Waters would not say much about what happened next, but men who were there say that he dashed out, “under the snipers’ noses,” got the line corporal back along the road to the aid post. A few minutes later he returned and rallied the line party to carry out the work. He had been told: “The line must get through.” “For the next 3 hours,” said Waters, “we carried on laying that line along 100 yards of road. All the time we were laying that line we were watched by Hun snipers and mortar chaps—and fired at. But we got the line through, as we had been ordered.”
Laying and repairing lines has given Cpl. Waters other adventures, too. He went out with a couple of signalmen at night on line repairs. A bomb fell near by, and, literally, blew all three men out of the car. “When we got back to the car, it looked more like a colander than a jeep. It was peppered with shrapnel,” says Waters.
Cpl Waters worked at Cadeby Main pit for six years until, in 1943 he joined the K.0.Y.L.I. at Doncaster. In 1935-6 he went with the Ist Battalion K.O.Y.L.L. to Gibraltar, and in 1936 to Burma, where he joined the Commandoes. In 1941 ‘he was sent with a special mission to China, to train Chinese in demolitions and guerilla warfare, From China he returned to his Commando in India, was too late (as he put it) to get into the Chindits, as he wanted, and later came back home and joined the airborne forces as a parachuting signal corporal.