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I think - we had neither calendars or watches!

I know that feeling. When I deployed 10 years ago, we never really had a good sense of dates. We knew what day of the week it was based on the Battle Rhythm, what meeting we had to go to and what operations we being run, but other than that, I had to look at a calendar to get a perspective of what day of the month it was.

Interesting history on wrist watches:

The concept of the wristwatch goes back to the production of the very earliest watches in the 16th century. Elizabeth I of England received a wristwatch from Robert Dudley in 1571, described as an arm watch. From the beginning, wrist watches were almost exclusively worn by women, while men used pocket-watches up until the early 20th century.[11]

Wristwatches were first worn by military men towards the end of the 19th century, when the importance of synchronizing manoeuvres during war, without potentially revealing the plan to the enemy through signalling, was increasingly recognized.

The impact of the First World War dramatically shifted public perceptions on the propriety of the man's wristwatch, and opened up a mass market in the postwar era. The creeping barrage artillery tactic, developed during the war, required precise synchronization between the artillery gunners and the infantry advancing behind the barrage. Service watches produced during the War were specially designed for the rigours of trench warfare, with luminous dials and unbreakable glass. The British War Department began issuing wristwatches to combatants from 1917.[14] By the end of the war, almost all enlisted men wore a wristwatch, and after they were demobilized, the fashion soon caught on: the British Horological Journal wrote in 1917 that "the wristlet watch was little used by the sterner sex before the war, but now is seen on the wrist of nearly every man in uniform and of many men in civilian attire." By 1930, the ratio of wrist- to pocketwatches was 50 to 1

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watch