President Joe Biden embellished details while telling a story about the disappearance of his uncle during World War II, suggesting that he had been eaten by “cannibals” after getting “shot down” in Papua New Guinea.
Biden, who made the comments during a Wednesday visit to Scranton, Pennsylvania, was referring to his uncle Ambrose Finnegan, a second lieutenant who served in the Fifth Air Force during the war. Finnegan went missing on May 14, 1944, while on a flight from Los Negros Island to Nadzab Airfield in New Guinea.
“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,” Biden said during his speech to steelworkers.
Biden, 81, told a similar story earlier in the day when visiting a World War II memorial in Scranton.
“He got shot down in an area where there were a lot of cannibals at the time,” the president said. “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.”
Biden’s comments about the disappearance of his uncle do not align with official government records about the crash, which suggest that the plane went down due to mechanical failure and that three of the men onboard drowned.
“For unknown reasons, this plane was forced to ditch in the ocean off the north coast of New Guinea,” a U.S. military report on the incident says. “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.”
New Guinea was a key battleground during World War II as the Japanese sought to control the island for access to Australia, prompting fierce fighting through the island’s remote jungles. The island also has a history of cannibalism, with Michael Rockefeller, the son of Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, reportedly being eaten by a tribe of cannibals on the island in 1961.
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His remarks on Wednesday were not the first time he had made up details related to his relatives’ military service. During a speech in December 2022, Biden said that he got his uncle, Frank Biden, the Purple Heart for service during World War II.
Biden claimed that as vice president, he awarded his uncle the Purple Heart for action during World War II in the Battle of the Bulge, saying the ceremony took place with his father and uncle. However, both Biden’s father and uncle had been dead for years before Biden became vice president in 2009. There was also no evidence that Biden’s uncle had been awarded the Purple Heart for his service.