Uncle Bosie Got Ate By Cannibals

Or did he? From a president with a history of tall tales, what is the real story?

President Joe Biden told the story of his Uncle Ambrose “Bosie” Finnegan Jr three times within 24 hours yesterday and tried to tie in his son Beau all to repeat the “suckers and losers” lie about his political opponent, Donald Trump.

First, the whole “suckers and losers” nonsense has been debunked. Trump never said it, and it was the Secret Service that refused to take him to the Paris cemeteries because of the bad weather.

Second, Beau Biden did not return from his year in Iraq with Stage 4 Cancer. Beau left Iraq in 2009 and wasn’t diagnosed with cancer until 2013. The cause of Beau’s cancer was never officially determined, and the president is known to exaggerate the science surrounding the Iraq burn pits. What is known is that when President Biden’s maternal Grandfather, Ambrose Finnegan Sr, died in 1957, “Remnants of Cerebral Hemorrhage” was listed as a contributing factor. The president’s paternal grandfather’s cause of death was also “Cerebral Hemorrhage.” President Biden had not one but two brain aneurysms back in 1988 that almost killed him. While it is entirely possible that Beau was exposed to toxins in Iraq that triggered his brain cancer, there is no way of knowing, and it has never been scientifically proven.

Lastly, there is the retelling of the story of Uncle Bosie. From an official transcript of yet another retelling:

And when D-Day occurred, the next day, on Monday, all four of my mother’s brothers went down and volunteered to join the military.  And four of them — three of them made it.  One was 4-F — couldn’t go.

And Ambrose Finnegan — we called him “Uncle Bosie” — he — he was shot down.  He was Army Air Corps before there was an Air Force.  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. 

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 and the like.

But, like many of the president’s stories, it’s almost all lies. In fact, the only kernel of truth in the story is that Uncle Bosie was in the Army-Airforce.

Ambrose Finnegan Jr signed up for the draft in 1940. At age 27, Bosie enlisted with his brother Jack and a neighborhood friend (not three Finnegan brothers) on January 21, 1942 (Ancestry - sub needed), mere weeks after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941.

After training at a few different locations, John and Ambrose were sent to MacArthur’s command in the Pacific in July 1942.

The brothers served together and even went through Officer Candidate School in Australia together, graduating in January or February 1944. After this, they were split up. John stayed in Australia, and Ambrose went to the 5th Air Force Headquarters Squadron as an assistant ordinance officer. This means that he would be in charge of making sure the command had all the needed ammo and that the various weapons systems were operating at all times.

On May 14, 1944, Gen. George McArthur tasked Pilot 1st Lt. Harold Prince and his crew to fly a courier mission. His mother would later get a letter from Gen. McArthur explaining that her son and his crew were on a personal mission for him that day. 2nd Lt. Ambrose Finnegan was the designated courier. The flight was from Momote Air Field on Los Negros Island to an airstrip in Nadzab, Papua New Guinea.

The airplane was a recently repaired A-20 named Barry’s Baby. It had been heavily damaged a month earlier in a battle known as Black Sunday, and after it was repaired, it was relegated to non-combat flights. According to Pacific Wrecks, the flight ran into problems about 40 minutes in and “attempted to ditch in the sea but both engines failed roughly 30' altitude and nosed over impacting hard.”

Of the four men on board, only the engineer managed to escape the plane. A nearby barge picked up TSgt Zulkus. Search and rescue tried to find the crash site, but the plane and the other three men were never found. The men, 1Lt Harold Prince, TSgt Ashford Cardwell, and 2Lt Ambrose Finnegan, were declared Missing In Action and later updated to Unaccounted For and categorized as Non-Recoverable.

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President Biden’s entire story about his uncle is just so far off base that it’s preposterous. Uncle Bosie died about a month before D-day, which was a Tuesday, even happened, so he certainly didn’t run down the recruiter and sign up because of it. He may well have been one of the last Sergeant Pilots in the Army-Airforce, but he was not a pilot when he died. He was not “shot down,” the plane had engine trouble. While there were cannibals in Papua New Guinea, his plane went down in the water north of the island. The insinuation that they never found his body because of the cannibals is just outrageous. While he was gifted a piece of a recovered A-20 aircraft by the Prime Minister of Papua New Guinea in 2023, it was NOT part of his uncle’s plane, which has never been found.

The true story of Ambrose Finnegan Jr is so incredible there is no need to embellish it. It is the story of a man who, possibly inspired by Pearl Harbor, signed up to defend his country and died in a plane crash while acting as a courier for Gen. Douglas McArthur. It makes the story the president told many times in the past few days so ridiculous.

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Lorraine Yuriar is a wife, mother, and lifelong conservative, currently stuck in a very blue state.