Biden claims ‘cannibals’ got his uncle

US military records tell a different story of the WWII incident

US President Joe Biden speaks to members of the United Steel Workers Union in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, April 17, 2024. ©  Jeff Swensen/Getty Images

US President Joe Biden has claimed on the campaign trail that an uncle of his who went missing in the Pacific during the Second World War had been eaten by cannibals.

Second Lieutenant Ambrose Finnegan of the US Army Air Forces was declared missing in May 1944, after his light bomber crashed in the sea. 

“He got shot down in an area where there were a lot of cannibals at the time,” Biden told reporters outside Air Force One in Scranton, Pennsylvania. “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.”

Several hours later, at a meeting with United Steelworkers union members in Pittsburgh, Biden told the same story.

“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,” the 81-year-old Democrat said.

According to the Pentagon’s agency for prisoners of war and missing in action (POW-MIA), Finnegan was never shot down, however. Nor was it on a reconnaissance mission, as Biden claimed.

The A-20 Havoc light bomber was on a “courier run” from the Los Negros Island when its engines failed at low altitude, per the official account of the incident. The plane dropped into the sea off the north coast of New Guinea and two out of three crew members never made it out of the sinking wreck, which was never found. The one man who survived was rescued by a passing boat.

Biden has told many fictitious tales about his life over a 50-year career in politics, most famously about getting arrested while trying to visitNelson Mandela in a South African prison. He has repeated one debunked story about an Amtrak conductor more than a dozen times.

The cannibal claim about Uncle Ambrose, however, served as a springboard for attacking his predecessor – and presumptive challenger – Donald Trump. In the campaign speech in Pittsburgh, Biden told a story about how Trump allegedly refused to honor fallen US soldiers buried in France, calling them “suckers” and “losers.” 

The story first appeared in The Atlantic magazine in September 2020, referring to events in November 2018, at the centenary of the WWI armistice. Trump denied the accusation, calling it “more made up fake news given by disgusting and jealous failures in a disgraceful attempt to influence the 2020 election!”

Documents debunking the Atlantic’s claim surfaced within days, but that has not stopped Democrats from repeatedly bringing it up as if true