President Joe Biden shared a personal story about his uncle during his recent visit to a war memorial in Scranton, Pennsylvania.
The 81-year-old mentioned that his uncle’s plane was shot down during World War II over New Guinea, an area known for cannibals, reported CNN.
President Biden paid tribute to his uncle, Ambrose Finnegan, who according to him was eaten by cannibals and whose body was never found.
The president said, “My uncle, they called him – Ambrose, they called him Bosie, and he became an Army Air Corps, before the Air Force came along, he flew those single-engine planes as a reconnaissance over war zones. And he got shot down in New Guinea, and they never found the body because there used to be a lot of cannibals – for real – in that part of New Guinea,” as per CNN.
However, Mr Biden’s recounting of his uncle’s death is different to the account published by the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency.
According to their report, “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.”
The report added that an aerial search party 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. He has not been associated with any remains recovered from the area after the war and is still unaccounted-for. Today, Second Lieutenant Finnegan is memorialized on the Walls of the Missing at the Manila American Cemetery in the Philippines,” the report read.
White House Deputy Press Secretary Andrew Bates told CNN that President Biden “is proud of his uncle’s service in uniform, who lost his life when the military aircraft he was on crashed in the Pacific after taking off near New Guinea.”
He added, “The President highlighted his uncle’s story as he made the case for honouring our ‘sacred commitment…to equip those we send to war and take care of them and their families when they come home,’ and as he reiterated that the last thing American veterans are is ‘suckers’ or ‘losers.’”
