HMS Foxglove's survival under dive-bomb attack leads to a broader lesson about judging aircraft effectiveness from individual sinkings. Small warships devoted a large central volume to engines and boilers, leaving less subdivision and reserve buoyancy if a bomb detonated amidships. Hits near the bow or stern could still be severe but gave the remaining hull more opportunity to contain flooding and blast damage. The comparison explains why similar destroyers or sloops could suffer very different outcomes from apparently similar attacks without reducing the issue to a simple claim that dive bombers always sank what they hit.
Notable Point · 1:42:36-1:43:29
Bomb-hit location shaped small-warship survival
A bomb amidships could destroy machinery spaces, while comparable hits near the ends of a sloop or destroyer left more structure available to contain damage.