SIAP: Biden Says His Uncle May Have Been Eaten by Cannibals

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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. Second Lieutenant Ambrose J. Finnegan entered the U.S. Army Air Forces from Pennsylvania and served in Headquarters, Fifth Air Force. He was the passenger on this Havoc when it was lost

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Ambrose Finnegan—we called him 'Uncle Bosie'—he was shot down," Biden said Wednesday, per a pool report. "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.

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Los Negros Island

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Finnegan, the brother of Biden’s mother, “got shot down in New Guinea,” Biden said. The president said Finnegan’s body was never recovered and “there used to be a lot of cannibals” in the area. Biden, who also relayed a version of the story earlier in the day after stopping by the memorial in Scranton, was off on the particulars.

The U.S. government’s record of missing service members does not attribute Finnegan’s death to hostile action or indicate cannibals were any factor.

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“We have a tradition in my family my grandfather started,” said Biden, a toddler at the time of his uncle’s death in 1944. “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.”

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The Democratic president also misstated when uncles enlisted in the military, saying they joined “when D-Day occurred, the next day,” in June 1944, when they actually joined weeks after the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor.

After Finnegan’s death, a local newspaper published a telegram from Gen. Douglas MacArthur expressing condolences to Finnegan’s family:

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He has literally lied about every aspect of his life.

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