The Battle of Britain Five Months That Changed History, May—October 1940 by James Holland (z-lib.org).epub

17
Black Monday
MEANWHILE, IN BERLIN there was no mention of the fact that the panzers
had been brought to a pointless halt. Rather, William Shirer was given a
communiqué that the fate of the Allied armies in Flanders was sealed.
‘Calais has fallen,’ he noted on 26 May. ‘Britain is now cut off from the
Continent.’ There were even reports in the Völkischer Beobachter that the
Luftwaffe had bombed south-east England.
The fate of the Allied armies in Flanders would have been sealed had
von Rundstedt not been such a pig-headed fool. Not until 1.30 p.m. on the
26th did he finally lift the order; however, it was not until 8 p.m. that night
that Panzer Group Kleist was finally given operational orders, and they
were not to begin until the morning of 27 May. In other words, the panzers
had been idle for three whole days. By then, Gort’s men, as well as the
French, had been organized and had dug in along the Canal Line. As Halder
noted, ‘On [the] left wing, von Kleist seems to encounter stronger resistance
than expected.’ He was still steaming.
The Royal Navy had not been idle since the opening of the offensive. Still
heavily engaged around Norway, it had also been involved in blowing port
installations and fuel depots in Holland to prevent the Germans getting their
hands on them, ferrying Queen Wilhelmina to safety, and taking more
troops and supplies to France and then evacuating them back to Britain too,
whether it be from Cherbourg, Dieppe, Boulogne or Dunkirk; 5,000
refugees and nearly 3,000 troops had been lifted on 23 May, for example.
There were also minelaying and minesweeping duties and coastal patrol
work to be carried out.
Gort’s warning on 19 May that the BEF might need to consider
evacuation had been passed on to the Admiralty, where a meeting had
immediately been held to discuss the matter. It had been decided that,
should it come to it, an evacuation operation should be controlled by the
Naval Sub-Command of Dover, under Vice-Admiral Bertram Ramsay.
Representatives from the War Office Movement Control and Ministry of