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

Despite these arguments and the opposition of both Halifax and
Chamberlain to such a decision, Churchill insisted on helping the French.
Both men and more aircraft would go to France.
On 5 June, Generaloberst Erhard Milch, number two in the Luftwaffe, flew
over Dunkirk. He was struck by the enormous devastation he saw there: the
thousands of abandoned vehicles and equipment, the charred rubble that
had once been the old Channel port. What had surprised him more than
anything, however, had been the absence of British troops.
That evening, he visited Göring aboard Asia. His boss had been back to
Potsdam throughout the attack on Dunkirk but had now returned to France
and was delighted that the BEF had been so routed.
‘The British Army?’ said Milch. ‘I saw perhaps twenty or thirty
corpses. The rest of the British Army has got clean away to the other side.
They have left their equipment and escaped.’ The British had suffered a
major defeat, of that there could be no doubt, but there was no denying that
they had managed to flee with almost their entire army. Göring asked him
what the Luftwaffe should do now. Milch recommended sending all
available aircraft in Luftflotten 2 and 3 to the Channel coast and then
invading immediately. The Kriegsmarine would not be ready to take troops
across yet, but the Luftwaffe could act right away. Paratroopers could
capture vital airfields in south-east England and then they could fly in Stuka
units to operate from them, just as they had in Norway. The remaining
transport aircraft could ferry over perhaps two or three divisions of ground
troops. It was, he realized, a gamble, but one worth taking because the
British would be incapable of offering much resistance at the present time.
The RAF had suffered and the army had no equipment; the time to strike,
Milch argued, was now. ‘If we leave the British in peace for four weeks,’ he
told Göring, ‘it will be too late.’
Göring was unconvinced by these arguments. He had just one airborne
division, rather than the four he had tried to create. ‘Had I had these four
divisions at the time of Dunkirk,’ he said, ‘I would have gone across to
Britain immediately.’ The Luftwaffe’s failure to destroy the BEF and
French forces at Dunkirk had been a disappointment, but in light of its
enormous success in the rest of the campaign, Göring was not unduly
concerned. Nor, it appears, was Milch, who despite urging an immediate
attack against England seemed content to get on with the job in hand once