What did a sailor do during world war 2?

Answer 1

Several of the combatant nations of WWII had large navies, including Germany, Italy and Japan on the Axis side, France, on the Axis and then on the Allied side, and Britain and its Commonwealth nations and the US on the Allied side. The answer might depend on the navy in which a sailor was serving.

It would also depend on whether the sailor had duty aboard a ship, or shore duty. If on a ship, a warship, or an auxiliary vessel. If a warship, a big one, or a smaller one.

In the US Navy it would also depend mostly on the sailor's specialty. Everybody was a Seaman recruit when they went in the US Navy. After boot camp they might remain a seaman, or become a fireman if destined to work in the engine room of a ship, or an aviation man if he was to be an enlisted gunner or radioman on a carrier aircraft.

Every US Navy ship had the crew divided into divisions. The Deck Division took care of the ship. This was an endless routine. They swept the weather deck (the main deck exposed to the outside air) of the ship from stem to stern (front to back) every day when it wasn't raining, a "clean sweep down fore and aft". Then they swabbed the deck, that is, mopped it, with buckets of seawater and mops. Then, they holystoned the deck. The deck was teak planking laid over steel. The Deck Division took a special type of brick, used for lining the fireboxes in the boilers of the engines. These had a rough texture to the surface, and holes in them, like any brick. These were new firebricks that had not been in the engine fires. They broke them in half, and each half brick had a hole in it. They stuck a piece of a broom handle in the hole, and rubbed the rough bricks up and down every inch of each of the deck planks. so it was something like sandpapering the deck. When they got done with that, they chipped paint. Every exposed surface of the ship was painted, over and over and over again, to protect it from salt water. Before a new coat of paint was applied, the old paint was chipped, by hand, with something like a chisel or a paint scraper, to make the surface smooth. This boring, repetitive, labor-intensive, mind-numbing work was never done. Once the ship was three or four days out from land, dust disappeared, and it was easier to keep the ship clean. You only get dust from land.

Every sailor usually also stood watches. These were four hours on, four hours off, all day, all night, every day. Every sailor had a watch station. So you never got eight hours of sleep all at once. Every sailor also had a Battle Station. On the order, passed over the ship's loudspeakers, to "Man Battle Stations" there was a mad scramble as every sailor, even those in their bunks, sitting on the toilet in the head (bathroom), in the shower, off watch, ran full tilt to get to their Battle Station. The order to man battle stations was usually accompanied by the order to "Set Condition Z", which meant to close and dog down every watertight door in the ship. If the ship took damage, the watertight doors would keep flooding in the damaged area. Any men in the damaged area were likely to be drowned, of course, if not killed when the damage was inflicted. The ship had a damage control party that assembled when Battle Stations was sounded. They were ready to fight fires, man pumps to expel seawater flooding in, and try to plug holes, with mattresses. They had long pieces of timber to jam in behind the mattresses to wedge them tight up against any holes.

The Navy doesn't have sergeants, it has Petty Officers. Almost all of these Petty Officers are specialists of one kind or another. After a sailor had been on a ship a few months, he was usually given a chance to try to work at becoming a specialist in one of these areas, and work on getting promoted to Petty Officer. When he was doing this he was a "striker", striving for a particular "rating" as a Petty Officer. If he got it done he was promoted to Petty Officer 3rd Class in whatever his specialty might be. So he might be a Radioman 3rd Class, or a Gunner's Mate 3rd Class, or an Aviation Machinist Mate 3rd Class, or a Coxwain 3rd Class, and so on. There were several dozen different ratings, types of Petty Officers. He could go up to 2nd Class, then First Class, then Chief Petty Officer, and so on. The sleeve insignia for a Petty Officer is an eagle perched on top of the symbol of the man's specialty, with upside down red chevrons below, one chevron for 3rd class, two for second, three for 1st. These were referred to as "crows", because of the eagle, as in, "If you do that, you'll lose your crow".

So, on a ship, every sailor usually had somewhere specific to be, most of the time, and had lots of duties and responsibilities, but there was such a wide range of these assignments its difficult to generalize.