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The Battle of Kinburn: The French ironclad floating batteries can just be seen centre through the smoke.
French floating battery “Lave”, 1854 Ironclad (17” wooden hulls with 4.5” iron plates) armor for protection
The Crimean War persuaded all maritime powers that sailing ships must be converted to steam power for a nation to secure its waters. During the 1854 Crimean War British and French naval forces operated in the Baltic and off the Crimea. Steam, screws, and shells were used extensively for the first time. The first appearance of armored ships also dated back to the time of the Crimean war. The bombardment of Sevastopol by the combined Anglo-French fleets showed the allies that their wooden vessels might easily be set on fire and destroyed, in a battle with fortresses.
In the 1850s, the British and French navies deployed iron-armored floating batteries as a supplement to the wooden steam battlefleet in the Crimean War. The role of the battery was to assist unarmored mortar and gunboats bombarding shore fortifications. The French used three of their ironclad batteries (Lave, Tonnante and Dévastation) in 1855 against the defenses at the Battle of Kinburn (1855) [1] on the Black Sea, where they were effective against Russian shore defences. The ironclads approached to within 100 yards of the enemy guns (a distance at which wooden ships would have been shot to splinters), and engaged the Russian forts. The French floating batteries proved to be nearly impervious to Russian fire, and succeeded in nearly leveling the fortifications. They would later be used again during the Italian war in the Adriatic in 1859.
The batteries have a claim to the title of the first ironclad warships but they were capable of only 4 knots under their own power and were towed into action, and were marginal to the work of the navy. The brief success of the floating ironclad batteries convinced France to begin work on armored warships for their battlefleet.
The British plan to use theirs in the Baltic Sea against Kronstadt, was influential in causing the Russians to sue for peace. In the aftermath of the fight at Kinburn, the durability of the ironclad batteries could no longer be ignored by the world’s sea powers. In 1856, the British ordered the construction of three ironclad floating batteries. Named Erebus, Thunderbolt, and Terror, these ships were classed as armored batteries measuring 108 feet in length and 48 feet in width; each carried 16 guns. The ships were steam-powered and were able to cruise at five knots.
[1] The Battle of Kinburn was a naval engagement during the final stage of the Crimean War. It took place on the tip of the Kinburn Peninsula (on the south shore of the Dnieper river estuary in today’s Ukraine) on October 17, 1855. During the battle, a combined British Royal Navy and French Navy force engaged Russian forts on shore.
The battle, although insignificant to the outcome of the war as a whole, is notable as an early success of ironclad warships. Although frequently hit, the French ships destroyed the Russian forts within four hours, suffering minimal casualties in the process. This battle, as well as the Battle of Sinope, convinced contemporary navies to abandon wooden warships and focus on armour plating.
