The Battle of Jutland (31 May to 1 June 1916) was by far the largest naval battle of the First World War (1914 to 18). The only time the bulk of the British and German fleets faced each other, the battle occurred in the North Sea south of Norway. The last great naval battle in history that involved only surface vessels, Jutland involved around 250 ships. The battle ended in a draw, although Germany claimed victory since it had lost fewer ships and men. In contrast, Britain claimed a strategic victory since the German High Seas Fleet never again posed a serious threat to British waters during WWI.

Various types of ships were employed by both sides in the Battle of Jutland. Battleships had the biggest guns and thickest armour plating. Battlecruisers were as well armed as battleships but faster since they carried less armour plating. Light cruisers were typically used as a protective escort for the slower battleships. Destroyers were the least well-armed ships and had little or no armour, but they could fire torpedoes and outpace any other category of ship, advantages which made them a serious threat to the battleships.

The British Grand Fleet, the Royal Navy's principal fleet, was based at Scapa Flow in the Scottish Orkneys. In 1916, the Grand Fleet consisted of around 100 ships, of which 24 were dreadnoughts, the newer class of battleships. The overall command was in the hands of Admiral John Jellicoe (1859 to 1935), a popular leader but one adverse to delegating tasks to others and known for being ultracautious. Jellicoe's flagship was the battleship HMS Iron Duke.

The German High Seas Fleet, Germany's main naval fleet, was based at Wilhelmshaven. The German Imperial Navy was the second largest in the world after the Royal Navy, and, in 1916, the High Seas Fleet boasted around 100 ships, 22 of which were battleships (16 of those being dreadnoughts). Overall command, from January 1916, was in the hands of Admiral Reinhard Scheer (1863 to 1928). The admiral's flagship was the battleship Friedrich der Grosse. Notwithstanding Kaiser Wilhelm's desire to preserve his navy intact, Scheer was determined to try and lure the British Grand Fleet out of the safety of its home base and into open waters where he believed he could strike a blow that would prevent the enemy from continuing its distant but highly effective blockade of Germany. The very real danger in such a plan was that the British fleet was the more powerful of the two, thanks to its greater number of battleships.

The High Seas Fleet set out and sailed along the western coast of Denmark. To entice the British to leave Scapa Flow, Scheer used a scouting force under the command of Admiral Franz von Hipper (1863 to 1932) as bait. This force consisted of 40 ships, including five battlecruisers and five light cruisers. Some way behind this scouting force was the rest of the fleet.

The British Admiralty intelligence service had easily discovered the preparations for such a large movement of enemy ships by intercepting and decoding the unusual flurry of enemy radio communications throughout May. The Grand Fleet was ordered to leave Scapa Flow in the early evening of 30 May, and by 10 p.m., the British ships were already leaving harbour. The first German ships only left port in the early hours of 31 May, and the remainder followed before dawn.

Two other setbacks for Scheer besides the loss of surprise were the poor weather, which prevented Zeppelin airships from taking off from Germany and acting as ship spotters, and the inability of a pack of U-boats waiting off the coast of Scotland to intercept and engage with the British ships.

Two additional British groups sailed from Invergordon (2nd Battle Squadron) and Rosyth (Battle Cruiser Fleet). The British Grand Fleet and the 2nd Battle Squadron, which included another four battleships, joined forces and moved eastwards. The Battle Cruiser Fleet, acting as a scouting group, was commanded by Admiral David Beatty (1872 to 1936), who was something of a star in the Royal Navy, being the youngest man to reach the rank of rear-admiral in a hundred years. Beatty had already notched up some notable victories in the war, including the Battle of Heligoland Bight in 1914 and the Battle of Dogger Bank in 1915. Beatty's flagship was the super-dreadnought HMS Lion, a formidable fighting vessel with eight 13.5-inch (34.3-cm) guns and sixteen 4-inch (10.1-cm) guns.

Beatty's scouting group was composed of 52 ships and included four super-dreadnoughts and six battlecruisers. The two sides knew the general movements and direction of each other, but neither side was quite sure either how big the enemy force really was or where it precisely was. The first ship to spot the enemy was the British light cruiser Galatea, which came across the vanguard of Hipper's scouting group around 2 p.m. on 31 May.

Beatty decided to pursue the enemy as Hipper withdrew south, hoping to lure the British towards the larger and oncoming German fleet. The two scouting groups opened fire on each other. Thanks to more accurate firing, Hipper came out best in the initial clash, sinking two British battlecruisers, Indefatigable and Queen Mary, without loss to his own force. Beatty was undeterred and ordered his ships to close in on the enemy. It was around 4 p.m. that the British realised they were now facing the entire High Seas Fleet. Beatty ordered a hasty withdrawal with the intention of reversing the German strategy and instead luring them on to the main British force coming from the northwest.

A fighting pursuit followed over the next two hours as Hipper and Beatty's scouting groups both headed north. There were significant losses sustained by both sides. When Beatty finally sighted Jellicoe's Grand Fleet, he steered his own group to the east so that they could better engage the pursuing German ships. Jellicoe, meanwhile, was able to block the German line of retreat by forming a classic straight line of battle. As, by 6 p.m., all ships were in the same area, Scheer found his fleet had become temporarily trapped with nowhere to go but strike the unexpectedly numerous enemy.

A battle royal began with all ships firing upon the enemy whenever possible. The lighter-armoured battlecruisers were particularly vulnerable to enemy shells since no designer had considered that when fired from a great distance, naval shells would not hit the well-armoured sides of a vessel but would fall vertically and so hit the poorly protected deck. Very often, underneath the decks, there was poorly stored ammunition, which, when struck by a shell going straight through the deck, ignited and tore the ship in half. This was particularly so on the British side, a situation made worse by the mistaken belief that a lighter battlecruiser could outrun a battleship. In a literal sense, this was true, but no ship could outrun the guns of a battleship, such was their prodigious range. German battlecruisers found themselves similarly abused. The battlecruiser Seydlitz, for example, was hit by no fewer than 25 enemy shells but, although badly flooded, did not sink.

For the men involved, there was a mix of emotions as the ships slugged it out. British midshipman Henry Fancourt on HMS Princess Royal remembered:

We weren't frightened, we were excited and the gun's crew was shouting: bang, bang, bang! Oh no it's great; it was like being at a football match, you know, you want your side to win. You don't think about casualties and disasters until later.

(Imperial War Museums)

In the heat of battle, with heaving seas, mist, smoke from guns and stricken ships, visibility was poor, and it was difficult to understand what was happening to other ships, as here explained by Arthur Crown on HMS Shannon:

I remember we could hear the firing and firing. But it was so misty we didn't see the actual ships. But I was on deck on one occasion and I saw a terrific amount of smoke and fire that went up in the air. When it died down, there was nothing left to be seen. And I found out – and it was announced that it was the Queen Mary. It was a most vivid impression because, when I came to think of it after that hit, there was over 1,000 men had gone down with her.

(IWM)

German seaman Edgar Luchting also recalls the consequences of poor visibility during an intense naval battle:

…the smoke of the burning ships and of the gunfire more or less obscured the view sometimes up to 100%. That meant that if we were only 1,000 or 2,000 metres away from our ships, we couldn't see them anymore. And in one case that led to a rather awkward accident which might have meant disaster for us. We had made a torpedo attack on the British ships; we had broken through our ships and tried to come so near to the British line that we could fire our torpedoes. But the British line turned away and so it was simply hopeless to try and reach a position from which we could shoot our torpedoes and so we turned back and looked for our own ships. But there were none. There was smoke; clouds. But no German ships.

(IWM)

As visibility deteriorated rapidly, Scheer turned the bulk of his fleet 180 degrees while several destroyers distracted the enemy. This was around 6:30 p.m. Heading west, while the British headed south, Scheer managed to steer his fleet out of range of the enemy.

Just before 7 p.m., Scheer gained intelligence that the British had divided their fleet. This turned out to be wrong, but the German admiral was tempted by the opportunity, and he turned the German fleet to engage the enemy again. However, the German ships, ranged out in a line, now found themselves at a 90-degree angle to the British line for a second time, thus exposing the German vessels to the enemy's greater firepower. In addition, the German ships were silhouetted against the setting sun, helping the British gunners. The British inflicted heavy damage – 27 British shells hit their targets compared to two German shells, all in the space of just ten minutes – which convinced Scheer to try and break away a second time.

Four German destroyers formed a line to shield the withdrawal. This brief battle achieved its purpose from the German perspective. By 7:15 p.m., the German ships were out of range and heading south. Beatty and Jellicoe later took criticism for the enemy's escape, particularly in terms of signalling and reporting between ships. However, in the darkness, four destroyers could cause havoc, and there was the possible additional threat of undetected submarines in the area.

The British fleet did not directly pursue the enemy as it headed for home. Instead, Jellicoe attempted to get ahead of the enemy and form a line of ships that would block their retreat, forcing another battle when daylight returned. Such a manoeuvre was ambitious and failed when the future German positions were incorrectly estimated. Scheer, in fact, had brought his fleet through the very rear of the enemy fleet during the night. Despite a few minor engagements (although these still involved several sinkings and significant loss of life, including the scuttling of Hipper's flagship, the Lützow), Scheer was able to make good his escape. Jellicoe now chose, around 11 a.m. on 1 June, to end the pursuit rather than risk further losses to torpedoes fired from the German destroyers. Most of the German ships reached their home port by the early afternoon.

Scheer was keen to present Jutland (or the Skagerrak in German) as a German victory, and it was true that more British ships had been sunk than German in the encounter. The Royal Navy had lost 14 ships: eight destroyers, three battlecruisers, three armoured cruisers, and suffered 6,784 casualties. The German Imperial Navy lost 11 ships: five destroyers, four light cruisers, one (old) battleship, and one battlecruiser, and suffered 3,099 casualties. Regarding the surviving ships, the German fleet suffered the most damage. Scheer's original objective of destroying a significant part of the enemy fleet had failed, and most significantly, the British had not lost a single battleship in the encounter.

Hipper was awarded the prestigious Pour le Mérite medal for his brilliant tactical performance in the battle. However, the strategic reality was that Germany could not afford another bruising encounter with the enemy and so was henceforth obliged to restrict its naval activity to submarine warfare. As a contemporary edition of the New York Times put it: "The German Navy has assaulted its jailer, but is still in jail" (Winter, 335). Perhaps the most significant consequence of the Jutland stalemate was that in order to try another method of breaking the blockade, German U-boat commanders were once again permitted to pursue unrestricted warfare and sink enemy merchant vessels without warning. This decision meant that US involvement in WWI (which had hitherto been only a passive ally of the Entente Powers in terms of military action) became much more likely, and, in fact, happened.

Jellicoe came in for criticism for not dealing a heavier blow to the enemy when he had skilfully positioned his fleet between the German ships and their home base. Jellicoe, a cautious commander in most circumstances, was extremely wary of the threat from German submarines, and his information was not as it should have been because of signal failures on the part of the Admiralty. Although Jellicoe had achieved no more than a draw, he had done what he set out to do: chasten the enemy and maintain Britain's material advantage at sea. As Winston Churchill starkly pointed out, "he could have lost the war in an afternoon" (Bruce, 197).

For the rest of the war, the German High Seas fleet remained at its home port except for three brief and ineffective sorties. When the 1918 armistice with Germany was being negotiated, the fleet surrendered and was sent to Scapa Flow for internment, but the German commander, Admiral Reuter, ordered his ships scuppered on 21 June 1919.