The German High Seas Fleet, with 16 dreadnoughts against Britain's 28, knew it could not win a straight fight. Vice-Admiral Reinhard Scheer's strategy was surgical: use Vice-Admiral Franz Hipper's fast battlecruisers as bait to lure a portion of the British fleet into the path of the full German force, then destroy it before reinforcements could arrive. Submarines were pre-positioned off British naval bases to thin the response. But the British had cracked the German naval codes. When intercepted signals revealed a major operation was imminent, Admiral Sir John Jellicoe sailed the Grand Fleet from Scapa Flow on May 30, passing over the German submarine picket lines before they were ready. Beatty's battlecruiser force departed the Firth of Forth at the same time. The hunters were about to discover they were also the hunted.

Hipper's battlecruisers spotted Beatty's force to the west at 15:20 on May 31. The Germans opened fire first at 15:48, and their gunnery was devastatingly accurate from the start. Within the first hour, two British battlecruisers -- Indefatigable and Queen Mary -- exploded and sank after their magazines detonated, taking all but 22 of their combined crews with them. Watching Queen Mary disintegrate, Beatty reportedly turned to his flag captain and said, "There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today." The problem was not merely bad luck. British shells often shattered against German armor without penetrating, while German shells punched through and detonated inside. British cordite propellant, stored in silk bags rather than brass cases, was catastrophically vulnerable to flash fires that raced from turret to magazine in seconds.

Beatty's retreat northward -- the "Run to the North" -- succeeded in drawing Scheer's entire High Seas Fleet toward Jellicoe's Grand Fleet. Between 18:30 and nightfall at 20:30, with the setting sun backlighting the German ships and giving British gunners a clear advantage, the two main fleets engaged twice. Jellicoe executed a textbook deployment, crossing the German T and pouring concentrated fire into Scheer's van. Scheer, realizing his fleet faced annihilation, ordered an emergency battle-turnaway -- his ships reversing course simultaneously under a smoke screen and torpedo attacks by destroyers. He attempted the maneuver twice. Jellicoe, wary of torpedo attacks, turned away each time rather than pursuing aggressively. As darkness fell, the admiral positioned his fleet to cut off the German retreat, hoping to resume the fight at dawn.

Scheer had other plans. Under cover of night, the High Seas Fleet drove through the British rearguard in a series of confused, close-range actions lit by searchlights and gunfire. British destroyers and light cruisers clashed with German battleships at point-blank range but failed to alert Jellicoe to what was happening. By morning, Scheer's battered fleet had reached the safety of its home ports. The Admiralty, which had been tracking German signals, did not pass critical intelligence to Jellicoe -- one of several communication failures that haunted the British for years afterward.

Germany lost 11 ships and 2,551 men. Britain lost 14 ships and 6,094 men -- more than twice the casualties. German newspapers trumpeted a great victory, and the British public was stunned. But the strategic arithmetic told a different story. One month after Jutland, the Grand Fleet was stronger than before the battle, with 23 dreadnoughts and four battlecruisers ready for action. The Germans had 10 operational dreadnoughts. Scheer himself concluded that further attrition battles would exhaust the High Seas Fleet long before they weakened the British. The German surface fleet sortied into the North Sea only three more times during the entire war, each time withdrawing quickly. Germany turned instead to unrestricted submarine warfare -- a decision that would draw the United States into the conflict. The wrecks of Jutland's lost ships, scattered across the seabed in Danish waters, are now protected as war graves under British law.