Joe Biden said that his uncle may have been eaten by cannibals when his plane was shot down during WWII and that Donald Trump is undeserving of acting as commander-in-chief again.
The president of the United States visited a war memorial near his Pennsylvania hometown to honor his late uncle Ambrose J. Finnegan’s service in the conflict.
“He flew single-engine planes, reconnaissance flights over New Guinea. He had volunteered because someone couldn’t make it. He got shot down in an area where there were a lot of cannibals in New Guinea at the time,” Biden told reporters afterward.
“They never recovered his body.”
According to military records, Biden’s uncle was killed when his reconnaissance plane fell into the Pacific Ocean
However, there appears to be no record of his uncle’s death being caused by hostile action, nor is there any evidence that cannibals played a role in the inability to recover his remains, according to the US Defense Department.
According to military documents, he was killed when his reconnaissance plane fell into the Pacific Ocean off the northern coast of New Guinea in May 1944 due to engine failure.
“We have a tradition in my family my grandfather started,” Biden said. “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.”
He attempted to draw a comparison between his family’s legacy of sacrifice and Trump’s reported remarks that slain service members were “suckers” and “losers”.
Former Trump advisers claim he made the statements because he did not want to visit a cemetery for American war dead in France during his first term as president in 2018. Trump has denied making those remarks.
The president stated that Trump “doesn’t deserve to have been the commander-in-chief for my son, my uncle.”
Beau, Biden’s eldest son, died in 2015 from brain cancer. The president has linked his son’s death to his year-long service in Iraq, where the military utilized burn pits to dispose of waste.
White House spokesman Andrew Bates told NBC News that the president was “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 honoring 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’.”