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President Joe Biden made an odd suggestion Wednesday that his uncle who served in the Army during World War II may have been eaten by cannibals after his plane crashed off the coast of New Guinea.
In a portion of a speech at a campaign stop in Pittsburgh, Biden drew a distinction between his family's military service and Donald Trump's disparaging comments about military members as reported in The Atlantic in 2020. (Trump has denied making those remarks.) Biden then brought up Ambrose J. Finnegan, a second lieutenant with the U.S. Army Air Forces whose plane crashed off the coast of New Guinea in 1944.
“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 of his uncle.
Researchers have documented cannibalism practices in parts of the Melanesia region, but Biden's remarks raised eyebrows. As NBC News reported, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency said that Finnegan's plane was "forced to ditch in the ocean" for unknown reasons, and that three men, including Finnegan, "failed to emerge from the sinking wreck and were lost in the crash."
While Biden’s claim that his uncle’s remains were not recovered is in line with the official military record — the detail about cannibalism is not.
"He has not been associated with any remains recovered from the area after the war and is still unaccounted-for," the DPAA said of Finnegan.
Biden had also told reporters a similar story about his uncle after visiting a veterans memorial in Scranton, Pennsylvania, earlier Wednesday before departing for Pittsburgh, CNN reported.
White House Deputy Press Secretary Andrew Bates did not clarify Biden's remarks in a statement later but did add that the president "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."
The cannibalism detail in Biden's story about his uncle may simply be an embellishment or a bit of unsubstantiated family lore. At any rate, Biden does not appear to have brought that detail up before; according to The Associated Press, Biden only briefly mentioned his uncle as a flyer killed in New Guinea in his 2008 memoir.