Obese sailors???

If you're talking about Ward Bond as the CPO, you're probably barking at the wrong tree. The character is middle-aged and more of an overseer and task master to the crew than a fellow laborer in the duties to be performed aboard ship.

And he wasn't "obese." Most men gain weight later in life and deal with becoming overweight, but "obese" implies being VERY MUCH overweight. I don't think an extra 20-40 pounds makes a taller and large-framed man like Ward Bond "obese."

Finally, the story is set in WWII and many sailors had served in the Merchant Marine before enlisting or being drafted into the Navy. Different set of rules between the two organizations. When it's wartime, the military has been known to relax standards whenever feasible.


Okay folks, show's over, nothing to see here!

In ww2, we probably couldn't afford to be too fussy about who got drafted to do the fighting, the country needed hundreds of thousands to fight Hitler & the Japanese empire as well. Some obese guys probably did make it in if they were young & otherwise healthy enough.

I didn't really see any obese sailors in this movie. Are you perhaps confusing this movie with the sequel, "Ensign Pulver", which starred a very rotund Burl Ives as the captain?

Before military labor became expensive for the government, obese service members were not uncommon among all ages, but particularly, shall we say, the mature ones?

In the days when the draft was in effect, soldiers, sailors and airmen were more abundant and standards were lower. In general, less was expected of each member because there were always "more." The draft kept the price of military labor low. When the all-volunteer force came about, pay was continually increased to attract and retain service members. Part of this evolution in how manpower was managed was to increase expectations of member performance. As the service staffing numbers decreased, physical fitness was a major measurement of ability to perform (and therefore to be retained in service). Keeping your job is a huge incentive to stay fit.

So, in summary, fat-gut soldiers and sailors were not particularly rare in 1945.

Even much later, when I was in the US Army during (and in) Vietnam, we had some enlisted men who were down-right huge. We had one cook (appropriately enough) who came to our unit and was so big that the army didn't stock cook whites or even fatigue uniforms in his size. A special order had to be sent to the quartermaster depot in Phila. Pa. to custom make those uniforms for him. Yes, he was sent over to the hospital and put on a diet but he continued in his duties and there wasn't any thought of kicking him out of the army; he was already on his second enlistment.