Did that mean you wanted all smaller sailors on a submarine?

Not really. It might have been helpful to have some smaller sailors who could get into tight spaces to do some of the maintenance work. However, you needed some bigger men to push (technically to pull with pulleys and ropes) the 3,200-pound torpedoes into the tubes. You may also have needed someone to lift the heavy cylinder liners for the engines. The shells for the 5-inch gun weighed over 70 pounds. In short, you wanted a number of good-sized sailors in the crew to do some of the heavy lifting and pulling.

The result was that they would have had men of various sizes in the crew. It probably reflected the variety of the population in general, although with fewer basketball players.