By: Matthew St. Amand, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, Tilbury Times Reporter
The face of war is seldom what civilians imagine. Roland Anselm Papineau (1924 – 1945) was that face: young, bright, earnest, bespectacled, his eyes focused intently on the camera capturing him in uniform with all the heart-rending hope and gallantry of youth. He was 19 years old when he joined the Canadian Armed Forces in 1943. He would not live to see his twenty-first birthday.
Roland Papineau Jr., of Sarnia, keeper of his uncle’s memory, was born months after his uncle died in Europe. Roland Jr. first took an interest in his uncle’s story after his father gave him one of his uncle’s medals from the war. Over the decades, Roland compiled letters to and from his uncle from various family members, as well as photographs, and documentation of his uncle’s military career, brief as it was.
Roland Anselm Papineau was raised along with his four brothers in Tecumseh, Ontario. Two of his brothers also served in World War II: Réal and Ulysses Papineau.
There is every chance Roland could have avoided military service had he chosen to. He was a small man, weighing in at 127 lbs. His reasons for joining were probably in line with writer G.K. Chesterton’s thinking: “The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.” Roland didn’t hate anyone. He loved Canada. His military service comprised a total of 591 days, each meticulously documented in official records now in the possession of his nephew.
“My uncle spent Christmas of 1943 at Camp Ipperwash,” Roland Jr. explains. “Before soldiers were sent overseas, they were allowed a last visit home. So, my uncle was given his daily pay of $1.40, which he used to go home to visit his family. That was the last time they saw him.”
The following month, January 1944, Roland was sent to Nova Scotia and then shipped out to the United Kingdom on March 7, 1944. The crossing was fraught with danger. The Atlantic Ocean was filled with German U-boats that were malevolently efficient at sinking ships. Seven days later, Roland Sr., and the rest of his company, reached Liverpool.
“He continued training in the UK for eighty-two days,” Roland Jr. explains. “He was called into action as part of the June sixth D-Day Invasion—Canadian forces were assigned to Juno Beach, storming into Normandy. That was the beginning of the end of the war.”
Roland’s brother, Réal, was elsewhere in the D-Day Invasion, and he also survived. Réal survived the war, returned to Canada where he worked until retirement at Ford Motor Company, raised a family in Belle River, and passed away twenty years ago.
“Roland and his company continued into France, and he was wounded several times over the next year,” his nephew says. “On March 24, 1945, at the beginning of the Battle of the Rhine, Roland was killed in action. The war ended forty-five days later.”
Because the war was ongoing at the time of Roland’s death, he was buried in Germany, in a friendly cemetery. When the war ended, the Canadian government had his body reinterred to Groesbeek Canadian War Cemetery in Holland.
In all, 1.1 million Canadians volunteered in World War II. More than 42,000 lost their lives.
As Roland Sr.’s hundredth birthday approaches on April 22, his nephew accelerated his efforts compiling and organizing the documentation, military and personal, that he accumulated.
“I will be eighty soon and it’s time to sit down and write this story,” Roland, a retired French teacher, says. “While researching my uncle’s life, I went down one rabbit hole after another. I don’t know how all these letters made their way to me. It’s time to put it all together. No one in the family who knew Roland is still around.”
For all the answers Roland Jr. has, one thing remains a mystery: “The wonder of volunteerism,” he says. “As I worked on this project, I was filled with wonderment about why people sacrificed their lives for the greater good, supporting their homeland—and wondered, as well, where has it gone?”
April 22 marks Roland Anselm Papineau’s 100th birthday. It’s a milestone that shows we don’t need to wait for Remembrance Day to honour the ultimate sacrifice so many Canadians made to keep our country free.
