In a wild incident on Wednesday, April 17, President Joe Biden twice implied that his uncle, Ambrose Finnegan, was eaten by cannibals in New Guinea during World War II, when his plane crashed. The internet was quick to figure out, however, that Finnegan’s aircraft crashed into the Pacific Ocean, not into the island where cannibals could have gotten to him.
The cannibals comment came when, on that Wednesday, President Biden spoke to reporters at the Wilkes-Barre Scranton International Airport. A reporter asked him about a World War II monument he visited, asking, “Mr. President, will you talk about the war memorial you were just at very briefly? What did you see? What did you hear?”
Biden then spoke about his uncle’s war record, saying, “I wanted to see where my uncle, Ambrose J. Finnegan, was memorialized. And there was a World War Two memorial built for those who lost their lives in World War Two. And when D-Day occurred, the next day, on Monday, all four of my mother’s brothers went down and volunteered to join the military. And four of them — three of them made it. One was 4-F — couldn’t go.”
Continuing, Biden insinuated that his uncle had been eaten when his plane was shot down over New Guinea, saying, “And Ambrose Finnegan — we called him “Uncle Bosie” — he — he was shot down. He was Army Air Corps before there was an Air Force. He flew single-engine planes, reconnaissance flights over New Guinea. He had volunteered because someone couldn’t make it. He got shot down in an area where there were a lot of cannibals in New Guinea at the time. They never recovered his body. But the government went back, when I went down there, and they checked and found some parts of the plane and the like.”
He then turned to attacking Trump, making the false, debunked claim that Trump called veterans “suckers” and “losers.” Biden said, “And what I was thinking about when I was standing there was when Trump refused to go up to the memorial for veterans in Paris, and he said they were a bunch of ‘suckers’ and ‘losers.’ To me, that is such a disqualifying assertion made by a president — ‘suckers’ and ‘losers.’ The guys who saved civilization in the 1940s — ‘suckers’ and ‘losers.'”
Concluding, Biden said, “And I just wanted to go and — we have a tradition in our family that my grandfather started. When you visit a gravesite of a family member — it’s going to sound strange to you, but — you say three Hail Marys. And that’s what I was doing at the site. My — my gran- — my uncle, Ambrose Finnegan — Uncle — Uncle Bosie was a hell of a guy from what I — I never met him, obviously. And — but I just wanted to see where he was memorialized.”
Watch that incident here:
Biden made the same claim about cannibals when speaking to steelworkers in Pittsburg, saying, “He got shot down in New Guinea and they never found the body because there used to be — there were a lot of cannibals, for real, in that part of New Guinea,” Watch that incident here:
The internet was quick to note that the military’s record of what happened is decidedly different than Biden’s, pointing to the report from the military that says, “On May 14, 1944, an A-20 havoc (serial number 42-86768), with a crew of three and one passenger, departed Momote Airfield, Los Negros Island, for a courier flight to Nadzab Airfield, New Guinea. For unknown reasons, this plane was forced to ditch in the ocean off the north coast of New Guinea. Both engines failed at low altitude, and the aircraft’s nose hit the water hard. Three men failed to emerge from the sinking wreck and were lost in the crash. One crew member survived and was rescued by a passing barge. An aerial search the next day found no trace of the missing aircraft or the lost crew members.”
Featured image credit: screengrab from the embedded video
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