Memorial

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Pfc Alfred G. Corgan enlisted in Utica, New York on 21 January 1944.

They made a company-sized night patrol across the Rhine into Himmelgeist as a diversional tactic, to draw the armored reserve away from Patton's front, so that Patton could make an attack to split the Ruhr Valley, the Arsenal of Germany. They had to hold that town until the Germans shifted their reserve armor, and then retired to the Allied side of the Rhine.

They crossed the Rhine .... 126 A company men and four men from the 321st Artillery Battalion - in 16 assault boats, just after midnight on 11/12 April. They received very little small arms fire (Home guard), and only a few artillery shells came in. Those few shells killed three of their men outright on the other side, and wounded four; Alfred Corgan was one of those wounded. Two defenders were killed, and the company entered the town of Himmelgeist.

During a night attack on Himmelgeist, Pfc Corgan was wounded seriously in his arms by artillery shell fragments. Medics had bounded his arms tightly to his body in an attemps to stop the bleeding.

As the assault boats tried to cross the Rhine river to evacuate the wounded, the boat he was in, capsized after a shell, fired by a German tank, landed close to it. When he went into the water he could not swim for his bandaged arms. Other men heard him call for help and two men stripped off their clothes and swam back to look for the wounded, but because it was so dark without a moon they couldn't find them.

A memorial stone can be found at the Evergreen Hill Cemetery in Ostego County, New York.