BL 6-inch (152 mm) Mk VII guns with a range of , at Fan Bay Battery Four BL 9.2-inch (234 mm) Mks IX–X guns with a range of at South Foreland Battery Two BL 15-inch (381 mm) Mk I guns with a range of at Wanstone Battery, known as Clem (after Clementine Churchill) and Jane (after the pin-up). The guns were later joined by Lydden Spout Battery, consisting of three more BL 6-inch Mk VII guns. Also, three BL 13.5-inch (343 mm) Mk V naval guns from the First World War (named Gladiator, Scene Shifter and Piece Maker [sic]) were brought out of retirement in 1939 and mounted on railway chassis. The British coast batteries sank: Pentiver, 2,382 BRT, 2 March 1943 Livadia 3,094 BRT, 4 October 1943 Munsterland 6,315 BRT, 20 January 1944 Recum 5,500 BRT, 20 March 1944 S.184 (sunk 5 September 1944, by its own troops) Operational history Hellfire Corner This gunnery duel, along with heavy German shelling and bombing of Dover strait and the Dover area, led to this stretch of the Channel being nicknamed Hellfire Corner and led to 3,059 alerts, 216 civilian deaths and damage to 10,056 premises in the Dover area. British coastal convoys had to pass through the bottleneck of the Dover strait to transport supplies, particularly coal; Britain's road and rail network was not then able to cope with the volume of traffic that had to be handled. Although the German guns regularly fired on these slow moving convoys from 1940 to 1944, with an interlude in 1943, they only sank two ships and damaged several others. Two seamen were killed and others were injured by shell splinters from near misses. However, the civilian crews of the merchant ships found the shelling more unnerving than the attacks by aircraft or E-boats that they were also subjected to and there were instances of crews refusing to sail from their forming-up point at Southend-on-Sea because of the German guns. The Channel Dash On 11 February 1942, the German battleships and , the heavy cruiser and more than twenty smaller escort vessels sailed from Brest in Brittany to their home port of Wilhelmshaven by an audacious dash through the English Channel, codenamed Unternehmen Zerberus (Operation Cerberus). Due to poor visibility and a number of communication failures by British forces, the first response to the German squadron was by the 9.2-inch guns of the South