Joe Biden suggested his uncle may have been eaten by cannibals after his plane was shot down during World War II – as he said Donald Trump was unworthy to serve as commander in chief again.
The American President visited a war memorial near his home Pennsylvania hometown to honor the service rendered by his late uncle Ambrose J Finnegan in the conflict.
“He flew single-engine planes, reconnaissance flights over New Guinea. He had volunteered because someone couldn’t come. He was shot down in an area where there were a lot of cannibals in New Guinea at the time,” Mr. Biden said. journalists then.
“They never found his body.”
But there appears to be no record that his uncle’s death was the result of hostile action nor any indication that cannibals played a role in the failure to recover his remains, according to the U.S. Department of Defense.
Military records show he was killed when the reconnaissance plane he was in crashed into the Pacific Ocean off the northern coast of New Guinea in May 1944 after engine failure.
“We have a tradition in my family that my grandfather started,” Mr. Biden said. “When you visit a family member’s grave – this is going to seem strange – but you say three Hail Marys. And that’s what I was doing at the site.”
He attempted to draw a contrast between his family’s sacrifices and the remarks allegedly made by Mr. Trump that fallen soldiers were “suckers” and “losers”.
Former aides to Mr. Trump said he made the comments despite not wanting to visit a cemetery for American war dead in France during his first term as president in 2018.
Mr. Trump has denied making the remarks.
Trump ‘doesn’t deserve to be commander in chief’
The president said Mr Trump – the presumptive Republican nominee to take on Mr Biden in The November presidential election – “does not deserve to have been the commander-in-chief of my son, my uncle.”
Mr Biden’s eldest son, Beau, died in 2015 from brain cancer. The president linked his son’s death to his year-long deployment to Iraq, where the military used burn pits to dispose of waste.
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The president “proud of his uncle’s service”
White House spokesman Andrew Bates said in a statement to Sky’s US partner network NBC News that the president was “proud of the uniformed service of his uncle, who lost his life when the plane military aircraft he was on crashed in the Pacific after taking off near New Guinea.
He added: “The president highlighted his uncle’s story in pleading to honor our ‘sacred commitment…to equip those we send to war and to care for them and their families when they are coming home’, and reiterating that the last thing America’s veterans are is “suckers” or “losers.”
Mr Bates has not commented on the cannibalism allegation.