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Robert B. Monge
1943 PCHS Senior
Robert B. Monge was a 1943 graduate of Pekin Community High School. That same year, he enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps, where he fought against Japanese forces in the Pacific Theater. He was discharged with the rank of Corporal on June 17, 1946. After the war, Monge developed a strong desire to record the wartime history of Tazewell County men who had been sent off to fight.
That’s why he compiled WW2 Memories and joined with Jack Shepler to write a companion volume, The Book Eternal, a roll of Tazewell County servicemen who died in World War II and other wars. Monge also served as co-chair of the effort to place a veterans’ memorial on the Tazewell County Courthouse lawn. The memorial, listing all of Tazewell County’s fallen, was dedicated on Veterans Day in 1995.
The many stories in Monge’s book often provide firsthand accounts of the harrowing ordeals endured by the young men sent into battle to stop the racist and imperialist aggression of the Nazis and Fascists in Europe and North Africa, as well as the Empire of Japan in the Pacific and Asia. In addition to his own memories—and those of fellow Marine Chuck Dancey, the late John T. McNaughton, and numerous other veterans who returned from the war—Monge frequently reprints or adapts newspaper reports of local boys killed or reported missing in action.
These reports and obituaries, combined with Monge’s broader historical narratives of the war, are informative without being graphic or sensationalized. Still, given the nature of modern warfare and the monstrous ideologies that drove the enemy, the personal narratives in Monge’s book at times make for grim reading.
Robert B. Monge passed away in 2008.
