The <$>following is a summary of the epic Battle of Jutland fought between the Royal Navy of Great Britain and the German Navy on May 31 and June 1, 1916. It is extracted from John Keegan’s book, The First World War.THE responsible staff officer asked a veiled question and concluded from the answer that Scheer’s battleships were still in harbour. He transmitted that false information to Jellicoe who, in consequence and in order to conserve fuel, limited his speed southward while allowing Beatty and the battlecruisers to forge ahead. <$>Room 40 had correctly informed the naval staff that Scheer’s wireless call sign could still be located in his home port; since the question had not been asked, however, the intelligence officers did not say that, on going to sea, it left its harbour call sign behind and adopted another.

At the critical stage of the preliminaries of what would prove the largest naval encounter of the War, therefore, Jellicoe was making less than best speed to a junction with the enemy, while his reconnaissance fleet of battlecruisers was hurtling on an early and potentially disastrous encounter with a superior force.

Jutland, as the impending battle would be called (by the British; to the Germans it would, contentiously, be known as “the victory of the Skaggerak”), promised not only to be the largest naval encounter of the war but a of naval history thus far.

No sea had ever seen such a large concentration of ships or of ships so large, so fast and so heavily armoured. the High Seas Fleet, which had cleared the Heligoland Bight in the early morning of 31 May, consisted of 16 Dreadnoughts, six pre-Dreadnoughts, five battlecruisers, 11 light cruisers and 61 destroyers.

The Grand Fleet and the Battle Cruiser Fleet, which had left Scapa Flow and Rosyth the previous evening, included 28 Dreadnoughts, nine battlecruisers, eight armoured cruisers, 26 light cruisers, 78 destroyers, a seaplane-carrier and a minesweeper. Both sides also had submarines at sea, in the hope that the enemy might present a target to a lucky shot. Scheer’s plan, indeed, was predicated on the chance of drawing the British into a U-boat trap by showing his battlecruisers off Jutland.

No such chance came, however, nor were any of the navies’ associated aircraft or airships able to play a role. Jutland, in consequence, was to be both the biggest and the last purely surface encounter of main fleets in naval history.

The spectacle they presented never left the memory of those who took part, the densely ranked columns of battleships, grey against the grey water and sky of the North Sea, belching clouds of grey smoke from their coal-stoked boilers, the flash of white from the bows of the faster light cruisers and destroyers in attendance, as all pressed onward to action.

So large was the number of ships hurrying forward that the more distant formations blurred into the horizon or were lost to sight in the play of cloud and rain squall on the observer’s field of vision.