Frank Francis Jollineau: Service

At twenty-four years old, Frank Francis Jollineau had already completed six years of military service with the 97th Regiment of Sault Ste. Marie when he volunteered to serve in the First World War.

Frank Francis, a plumber by trade, enlisted with the 2nd Battalion on September 23, 1914, at Camp Valcartier, less than two months after the First World War began. He and his comrades were among the first Canadian infantry to go overseas as part of the war effort.

Departing on October 3, 1914, and landing in England for training on October 25, Frank Francis and his battalion were ready to mobilize for combat by February 1915 and soon entered the trenches. 

By April Frank Francis was fighting in the First Battle of Ypres. By the first week of May, 1915, three hundred members of the 2nd Battalion, including Frank Francis, were reported missing. Frank Francis had been captured as a prisoner of war. 

From April 29, 1915, until the First World War's end, Frank Francis was interned at various German prisoner of war camps. One of these camps was Giessen, where he contracted pneumonia and was treated at the military hospital, Kriegs Lazarette. Frank Francis was subsequently transferred multiple times, ultimately held in about four different camps during the remainder of the war.

Despite facing the first wartime use of poison gas at Ypres, German prisoner of war camps, and pneumonia—an illness that claimed the lives of hundreds—Frank Francis Jollineau miraculously survived the First World War. He was demobilized with the rest of the 2nd Canadian Battalion in spring 1919 to return home to Sault Ste. Marie.

See Our Sources

• Frank Francis Jollineau CGWP

• Cadotte VMFL

• 2nd Battalion CEF

• The Wartime Memories Project - 2nd Battalion (Eastern Ontario Regiment)

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