Why Britain would not gamble on ambiguous French orders

The French government treated the navy as a bargaining asset when seeking terms from Nazi Germany, because removing it from the Allied order of battle would seriously weaken Britain. The government's political resolve appears to have failed before the French Army exhausted every capacity to resist, leaving naval commanders with confused and changing instructions. Germany might hesitate to punish a rapid naval defection too severely because renewed French Army resistance could disrupt the victory it wanted to consolidate. Britain could respect the honour of French officers and sailors while remaining unable to predict whether they would obey a later order against their former ally. Dunkerque and Strasbourg might even have been in Plymouth if recently cancelled deployment orders had remained in force, placing two major ships under immediate British control after the armistice. This command-and-trust crisis explains why the counterfactual requires an early fleet-wide decision rather than scattered ships choosing independently.