Jutland: History's Largest Naval Battle Proves Indecisive

Two hundred fifty-one warships met in the North Sea, and when the smoke cleared, both sides claimed victory while burying their dead. The Battle of Jutland, fought on May 31 to June 1, 1916, was the largest naval battle of World War I and the only full-scale clash between the British Grand Fleet and the German High Seas Fleet. The result was tactically ambiguous and strategically decisive. The German plan, devised by Admiral Reinhard Scheer, was to lure a portion of the British fleet into an engagement with the full High Seas Fleet. Vice Admiral Franz Hipper's battlecruiser squadron would draw out the British, and Scheer's battleships would destroy them in detail. British intelligence, reading German coded signals, learned of the sortie and sent the entire Grand Fleet under Admiral John Jellicoe to intercept. The battle unfolded in three phases. Hipper's battlecruisers engaged Admiral David Beatty's force in the "Run to the South," sinking HMS Indefatigable and HMS Queen Mary in massive magazine explosions. Beatty reportedly remarked, "There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today." The running fight turned north when Beatty sighted Scheer's main fleet, drawing the Germans toward Jellicoe. Jellicoe deployed the Grand Fleet across Scheer's path in the classic "crossing the T" formation. Scheer, realizing he was outgunned, executed a simultaneous 180-degree turn under smoke cover, a maneuver so risky it had never been attempted in combat. He did it twice. Britain lost 14 ships and 6,094 sailors. Germany lost 11 ships and 2,551 men. Germany claimed a tactical victory based on the exchange ratio. Britain claimed strategic victory because the High Seas Fleet returned to port and never seriously challenged the Grand Fleet again. The naval blockade that was starving Germany continued unbroken. Jellicoe, as Churchill later observed, was "the only man on either side who could lose the war in an afternoon." He did not lose it.