Battle of Kinburn, 1855: the day armored warships went into action

Kinburn was a small operation at the end of the Crimean War. Its fame came later. It was the first battle in which warships protected by iron armor went into action, and the naval historian H. W. Wilson opened his history of ironclad warfare with it for exactly that reason.²

Iron against shell

Shell guns had already shown what they could do to wooden ships. At Sinope in November 1853 a Russian squadron firing shells destroyed a Turkish squadron at anchor, and on 17 October 1854 the British and French ships that bombarded the forts of Sevastopol were badly mauled.³ › Battle of Sinop, 1853

In 1854 France ordered a new kind of vessel: floating batteries with wooden hulls covered in iron plates about four inches thick. ShipScribe dates the order to 28 July 1854, while Wilson writes that Emperor Napoleon III ordered them on 5 September. They were slow, flat and barely seaworthy. ShipScribe gives them a trial speed of under four knots, and Wilson says they were never trusted on open water out of sight of other ships. Each carried a battery of heavy 50 pounder guns, sixteen in ShipScribe's list and eighteen in Wilson's, and a crew of about 280. Three of them, Lave, Tonnante and Dévastation, were towed to the Black Sea by paddle frigates, a voyage of about 45 days.⁴

The fleet off Kinburn

By the autumn of 1855 Sevastopol had fallen, and the Allies looked for new targets. The forts of Kinburn stood at the tip of a long, low sand spit that guarded the estuary of the Dnieper and the Southern Bug and the way to Nikolaev and Kherson. There were three works: a stone main fort with casemates and guns on the ramparts, a round battery to its north and an earthwork beyond it.⁵

After a feint toward Odessa, the combined fleet under Admirals Lyons and Bruat arrived off Kinburn on 15 October. Wilson lists six British ships of the line, seventeen frigates and sloops, ten gunboats and six mortar vessels, and a French squadron of four ships of the line, corvettes, gunboats and mortar vessels besides the floating batteries. Troops landed on the spit and cut the forts off by land, a division that Marshal Pélissier's order of the day says was commanded by General Bazaine. On the night of 16 to 17 October French boats sounded the channel under the walls and laid buoys for the batteries.⁶

17 October: the bombardment

At dawn French troops were already digging their first trench about 650 to 700 yards from the fort. The floating batteries steamed in to their buoys, about 800 yards from the main fort, and opened fire at 9:30 in the morning. The mortar vessels and gunboats joined in, and later the ships of the line took station further out.⁷

Inside the batteries the gun decks filled with smoke, and the crews worked in near darkness while Russian shot rang against the plates. The only casualties came from shot entering through the gun ports; one ball came through a port of Dévastation, killed a gunner and struck a sergeant of marines. Marines aboard each battery fired at the Russian gun crews on the ramparts. A correspondent of The Times, quoted in Dickens's Household Narrative, saw fire break out in the barracks at 11:10 and spread through the fort, and the Russian flag shot away at 11:15.⁸

In the end a white flag appeared on the rampart. Wilson puts it at 1:35 in the afternoon, after three hours of resistance; the Times correspondent says the firing stopped at two o'clock; and Pélissier's order of the day speaks of a bombardment of five and a half hours. The commandant, Major General Kokhanovich (Kokonovitch in the Times report), gave up his sword. The Times man reports that he left in tears, calling Kinburn the glory of Suvorov and his own shame.⁹

Prisoners, guns and the count of the dead

Pélissier's order put the garrison at one general, ten other officers and 1,380 soldiers, who marched out with the honors of war and surrendered as prisoners, leaving 174 guns in the fort. The Times correspondent, writing on the evening of the battle, counted about 1,100 men and heard that 200 were killed and 400 to 500 wounded. Wilson's later figures are much lower: 45 Russians killed and 130 wounded, against 2 killed and 25 wounded on the Allied side, all of them aboard the floating batteries. The next day the Russians blew up their fort at Ochakov across the water.¹⁰

Why Kinburn mattered

The armor held. Wilson records that Dévastation was hit 31 times on her side and 44 times on her deck, and that no shot left more than a dent of an inch or an inch and a half; Lave and Tonnante took about sixty hits each. Of the 62 guns and mortars in the fort, 29 were dismounted. "Everything may be expected from these formidable engines of war," Admiral Bruat reported.¹¹

Not everyone was convinced at once, and Wilson admits that opinion was divided about the batteries' success. Kinburn was a weaker work than Sevastopol, and the wooden ships had lost no men only because the Russians aimed at the batteries. But France drew the lesson quickly and began to rebuild its fleet around armor, while in Wilson's judgment Britain took another four years. ShipScribe's verdict is shorter: at Kinburn the batteries demonstrated the value of armor.¹²