WASHINGTON — As tens of thousands of soldiers stormed French beaches during the D-Day landings of World War II, 2nd Lt. John Arthur Finnegan was on duty in a mess hall half a world away on the northeastern coast of Australia.
As President Joe Biden commemorates the 80th anniversary of D-Day in France today, he will be thinking of the millions of young U.S. service members who answered the call to serve and defend the U.S. in World War II — including Finnegan and three other uncles. While none were among the thousands who came ashore on June 6, 1944, they supported the war effort in other ways. One made the ultimate sacrifice.
Japan’s deadly sneak attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii in December 1941 was a galvanizing moment in the United States, retired Army Col. Michael Bell said during a telephone interview from France, where he had traveled for the celebrations.
“Immediately, there’s a sense that war’s come to America,” said Bell, executive director of the Jenny Craig Institute for the Study of War and Democracy at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans.
“The day after Pearl Harbor my mom’s four brothers went down to sign up for war service,” Biden wrote in his memoir, referring to uncles Gerard, Edward, Ambrose and John, who registered at the local draft board in their hometown of Scranton, Penn. “Three of them got in.”
In the book, Biden speculated that his uncle Edward, who went on to become a traveling Serta mattress salesman, was rejected by the Army because of the “terrible stutter” he had his whole life.
John Finnegan, 21, and Ambrose Finnegan, 27 joined the Army Air Corps in January 1942 and were sent to Officer Candidate School in Australia. John Finnegan had quit his job as assistant manager and chief usher at a movie theater in Scranton, according to his Official Military Personnel File, which the National Archives and Records Administration shared with The Associated Press.
The personnel files for tens of thousands of U.S. service members who served in the Army during World War II were destroyed in a warehouse fire in the 1970s and little could be learned about Gerard Finnegan’s service beyond the president’s reference in his memoir to that uncle.
Ambrose Finnegan perished in the war just weeks before D-Day.
Ambrose, or “Bosie,” as the family called him, was a courier who died on May 14, 1944 — Mother’s Day — while a passenger on an Army Air Forces plane that, “for unknown reasons,” was forced to ditch in the South Pacific Ocean off the northern coast of New Guinea, according to the Pentagon’s Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency.
“Both engines failed at low altitude, and the aircraft’s nose hit the water hard,” the agency says in its listing about Finnegan. “Three men failed to emerge from the sinking wreck and were lost in the crash.” Finnegan and the others were presumed dead. His remains were never recovered. Gen. Douglas McArthur sent a letter of sympathy to Finnegan’s family.
Biden misstated a few facts when he related the story in April, saying his uncle’s plane was “shot down” in an area “where there were a lot of cannibals in New Guinea at the time.”
The U.S. government’s record of service members missing in action does not attribute Finnegan’s death to hostilities. Records also do not indicate that cannibals were a factor.
Biden, 81, was a toddler at the time of his uncle’s death.
