Crete changes ammunition policy and exposes command delay

The losses of Gloucester and Fiji led to an instruction that British cruisers should not let anti-aircraft ammunition fall below forty percent. The reserve accounted for the intensity of repeated air attack and the difficulty of transferring ammunition between ships at sea while still under threat. The initial decision to leave the depleted cruisers with the battleships also makes sense if another group was expected to return after rearming and relieve them. The harder question is why roughly forty minutes passed between learning the cruisers' ammunition state and transmitting the recall. Every minute steaming away widened the separation, prolonged exposure, and added still more time to the return journey needed to regain mutual support.