I'm reading Battle for the Falklands by Max Hastings and Simon Jennings. It describes a bomb hitting the RN frigate broadsword - "a bomb entered the starboard side of the ship and bounced out through the flight deck, destroying the lynx helicopter but failing to explode" - and this happens (a bomb entering a ship and not exploding but causing damage, one badly damaged a missile magazine) a few times during the conflict.
I don't understand how a bomb can enter and then travel through a ship. I'm sure I'm missing a simple bit of information - do ships have big open shafts on the top deck? - but I cannot wrap my head around how this happens.
And then how does it manage to travel through a ship, surely it would hit a wall immediately and stop/become lodged in a corridor?
Also is the unexploded bomb destroying the lynx by simply smashing into it?
Thank you so much for any help, every time it happens in the book I'm left lost.
I'm more a reader than a writter to this sub, but since I'm from Argentina and I know the answer, I'll do my best to elaborate it.
Documents has been declassified a few years ago about this very exact issue, where traditionally has been attributed to bombs malfunctioning. The basic response start to take into account that Argentine's airplanes were forced to flight very near from the water's level of the ocean (to avoid radar location and interception), and in order to hit a ship, they dropped the bomb very near of the target and to get out of there, as fast as the pilots could.
In the moment between the bomb was dropped and it made contact with the ship, it had to had at least a few seconds to arm itself and be able to detonate when the bomb makes a contact with the target. The declassifed documents says that bombs didn't had that time to arm its fuses.
Also it's important to point that bombs where modified by argentine technicians in order to make this type of attacks.
Forgive me for my weak english on this subject but I couldn't translate it better. Feel free to ask me anything, I have a lot of sources about this but it's all in Spanish.
As others have noted, the Argentine attacks were made from incredibly low level; there's actually a photograph of the pair of Skyhawks in the process of the attack:
The bomb that hit Broadsword skipped off the water, so was travelling on an upwards trajectory. Unlike heavily armoured World War II battleships, Broadsword was a frigate, with a mild steel plate hull, not much of an obstacle for the bomb that punched through it. There's quite a comprehensive gallery of the damage on the Broadsword Association's website:
http://www.hmsbroadsword.co.uk/gallery/falklands82/damage/damage.htm
There's quite a simple explanation, actually. The Argentine air force used old WW2 era free fall ("iron") bombs. To avoid the concentration of air defences massed by the British, Argentine pilots flew at an extremely low altitude - unfortunately for them, too low for the fuses to arm the bombs before contact in many cases.
As for the bomb travelling through the ship - you might be surprised at the kinetic force a 500lb lump of metal and explosives has when released by a Skyhawk travelling at 600 kph +. More than enough to wreck a helicopter upon impact and breach numerous decks of a lightly armoured ship.