Bullshit. The Monkees didn't write the song, Boyce & Hart did. I realize that Hart claimed it was a protest song 40-plus years after the fact (and only after Boyce had died) but that claim has about as much credibility as Dick Dale waiting until after Leo Fender died to make bogus claims about how he influenced Leo's amp designs. If you could travel back in time 50 years, you wouldn't find anyone who thought it was a protest song. And The Monkees didn't have a choice in the matter anyway.
Music and/or a lyric can work in wonderous ways. The Nazis despised Lili Marle(e)n (the spelling varies), they thought the longing lyric about a woman waiting near military barracks (who was she, a prostitute, a young widow?) for her significant other who might or might not return was inherently defeatist and morally questionable. The fact that Lale Andersen, the artist, was a single mom who liked a drink, had Jewish friends (she wouldn't give up) and wasn't easily courted by the Nazis didn't help. But the song became quickly so popular and was requested so often, they had to give in, Goebbels bemoaning the fact that it had "ever been recorded in the first place". In 1942, after a visit to Jewish friends in Switzerland, she was banned from performing. The ban was only lifted when Allied radio claimed that she had been "put in a concentration camp" and began power-playing the song. The Nazis relented, and Lale could do low key performances again in 1943, but not sing Lili Marle(e)n, her biggest hit and at this point the best-sold German single ever.
Given the times and what must have been on people's minds who were drafted, I find the Clarksville lyrics pretty angsty, I don't think that people thought the author was worried about a railroad accident either:
"'Cause I'm leavin' in the morning
And I must see you again
We'll have one more night together
'Til the morning brings my train.
And I must go, oh, no, no, no!
Oh, no, no, no!
And I don't know if I'm ever coming home."
BTW, the Lili Marle(e)n lyrics were written initially as a poem by a WW I (not II) soldier waiting for his transport to the Russian front and worried whether he might ever return - not such a different scenario to the one of Clarksville (as alleged by me, of course!).
Next thing, Dave is gonna say that High Noon wasn't a veiled rallying call agains McCarthyism either!