WASHINGTON (AP) — 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 Australia’s northeastern coast.
As President Joe Biden commemorates the 80th anniversary of D-Day in France on Thursday, he will remember the millions of young American service members who answered the call to serve and defend the U.S. in World War II — including Finnegan and three other service members . uncles. Although none were among the thousands who landed on June 6, 1944, they supported the war effort in other ways. One made the ultimate sacrifice.
Japan’s deadly attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii in December 1941 was a tense moment in the United States, retired Army Col. Michael Bell said in a telephone interview from France, where he had traveled for the festivities.
“Immediately you feel that the war has 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 mother’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 had registered for the local draft in their hometown of Scranton. Pennsylvania. “Three have come in.”
In the book, Biden speculated that his uncle Edward, who later became a traveling Serta mattress salesman, was rejected by the military because of the “terrible stutter” he had all his 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 an assistant manager and head 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 of tens of thousands of U.S. service members who served in the military 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 references in his memoir to that uncle.
Ambrose Finnegan was killed in the war a few weeks before D-Day.
Ambrose, or “Bosie,” as his 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 was forced to land in the South Pacific 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 nose of the aircraft struck the water hard,” the agency said in its listing of Finnegan. “Three men failed to get out of the sinking wreckage and were lost in the crash.” Finnegan and the others were presumed dead. His remains were never found. General Douglas McArthur sent a letter of condolence to Finnegan’s family.
Biden misstated some facts when he told the story in April. He said his uncle’s plane was “shot down” in an area “where there were a lot of cannibals in New Guinea at the time.” U.S. government records of missing service members do not indicate that Finnegan’s death was due to hostilities, nor that cannibals played a role.
Biden, 81, was a toddler when his uncle died. He recently made his first visit to a World War II memorial in Scranton and traced the inscription of Ambrose Finnegan’s name with his finger.
In his remarks in Scranton on “Bosie,” he referred to those who served as “the guys who saved civilization in the 1940s.”
While the Finnegan and Biden families in Pennsylvania mourned Ambrose’s death, John Arthur Finnegan was half a world away from dealing with his own grief. He and older brother Ambrose had joined the Army together, with a photo of the siblings and a mutual friend appearing in a local newspaper the day before they all joined.
John Finnegan belonged to the Army’s 8th Service Squadron, based in Townsville, Queensland, Australia, which Bell said was responsible for conducting maintenance and supply operations in support of the Pacific campaign at bases in nearby New Guinea.
The squadron’s daily “company morning report” for June 5, 1944, the day before D-Day, showed that 2nd Lt. Finnegan was assigned to “Add dy Sq Mess O vice 1st Lt. Billingsley Reld.” Translation: He had been assigned to support Reld in the squadron mess hall, possibly performing functions such as inspecting food operations, checking paperwork and accounting, and figuring out future rations, Bell said.
“In this case, he’s going to inspect the dining room,” Bell said. “He could have gotten that for a day or two. He was probably assigned that as an extra task.’
Finnegan left active duty in November 1945 and was honorably discharged from the Air Force Reserves in November 1961. Along the way, he had returned to Scranton, earned a bachelor’s degree in sociology and a master’s degree in psychology from the University of Scranton and worked in the school administration office and as a clinical psychologist at Delaware State Hospital in Wilmington. He was also married and had children, according to his military personnel records.
John Arthur Finnegan died in March 1973 at the age of 52. Biden was one of Finnegan’s pallbearers.
Biden had an uncle on his father’s side of the family who also served during World War II. Frank H. Biden entered the Army in July 1941, just months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, and was discharged in 1945.
In addition to Biden’s uncles, Donald Jacobs, the father of Biden’s wife, first lady Jill Biden, also joined the military during the war. Jacobs was 17 when he joined the Navy in November 1944, after D-Day, and became a signalman.
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AP researchers Jennifer Farrar and Randy Herschaft in New York contributed to this report.
