Swimming in WW2's Navy

[swellfella]

This must have been hit on somewhere sometime on these boards, but please permit me to vent anew.

It's always been a quirksome itch to me the number of guys in the Navy in WW2 who couldn't swim! Granted we were at war and could only be so choosy but... Jeeze, out on a boat, hundreds if not thousands of miles offshore in a time of war and you can't swim. How many guys did we lose because to this one seemingly prerequisite to water war.

I'm in the middle of research of Navy messman being trained in Norfolk prior to entering the wardrooms and shore kitchens of the Navy during this period and even these guys had to pass swimming classes in order to qualify for liberty.

And certainly subbers and the 100 foot escape tower was required yet I'm reading of at least one subber (a messman) who drowned after escaping to the surface from a sunken sub (Tang).

I'd appreciate any comeback from you guys on this for information sake and my morbid sense of bewilderment on a subject that on its face seems so self -evident and basic.