old-style turrets, which still permitted placement higher in the ship and the corresponding benefits to stability and seakeeping. This innovation gradually became known simply as a turret, though the armored tube that held the turret substructure, which included the shell and propellant handling rooms and the ammunition hoists, was still referred to as a barbette. These ships were the prototype of the so-called pre-dreadnought battleships, which proved to be broadly influential in all major navies over the next fifteen years. Ships equipped with barbette mountings did not see a great deal of combat, owing to the long period of relative peace between their appearance in the 1870s and their obsolescence in the 1890s. Some barbette ships saw action during the British Bombardment of Alexandria in 1882, and the participated in the Battle of Fuzhou during the Sino-French War in 1884. The two Chinese ironclads, and , that took part in the Battle of the Yalu River during the First Sino-Japanese War in 1894, carried their main battery in barbettes, though they were equipped with extensive gun shields that resembled turrets. The shields were nevertheless only proof against small-arms fire. Three of their opponents at the Yalu River, the Japanese s, also mounted their guns in open barbettes. Those barbette ships that survived into World War I were typically used only for secondary purposes. For example, the French was used as a repair ship for submarines and torpedo boats, while the German was employed as a torpedo training ship. A handful of barbette ships did see action during the war, including , which bombarded German positions in Flanders in 1914 and 1915. Use in bomber aircraft When applied to military aircraft, largely in aviation history books written by British historians, a barbette is a position on an aircraft where a gun is in a mounting which has a restricted arc of fire when compared to a turret, or which is remotely mounted away from the gunner. As such it is frequently used to describe the tail gunner position on bombers such as the Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress, with American aviation books frequently describing the position as a tail gun turret, or simply as a tail gun. The term "barbette" is also used by some, again primarily British historians, to describe a remotely aimed and operated gun turret emplacement on almost any non-American military aircraft of World War II, but it is