Jutland stands out an anomaly in the naval history of WWI, in the sense that it was the only occasion on which the full British and German battle fleets met in combat. Indeed, it was one of only a very small number of engagements in which the British and German dreadnought battleships and battlecruisers fought at all.
These ships had been built at enormous cost in the run-up to WWI, and the Anglo-German naval race was one of the factors which had raised tensions between the two countries during those years. It was widely expected that, if war broke out, these two huge and expensive forces would promptly step into the ring and slug it out to determine who would control the North Sea. Moreover, the Japanese had only recently (in 1905) won a Trafalgar-style battle against the Russians, using pre-dreadnought battleships, so this gave people an idea of what a WWI decisive battleship engagement might look like. So there was a lot of puzzlement when, on the outbreak of WWI, the North Sea emptied itself rather than filling up with warships. Britain clamped a “distant blockade” on the North Sea, using the English Channel and the passageways between the Orkneys, the Shetlands and Norway as choke points to interdict the whole area to enemy shipping.
Plenty of work was done during WWI by cruisers and destroyers and submarines, but the big battleships and battlecruisers on both sides spent most of the war sitting at anchor. Why? Paradoxically, it was Tsushima’s decisive character which made the British and German admiralties nervous about throwing their most expensive assets into a similar all-out battle. A combination of factors – good shooting on the enemy side and bad luck, design flaws and tactical errors on your side – could result in a capital ship being sunk or blown up in a matter of minutes (as had happened at Tsushima, and as ultimately happened to several battlecruisers at Jutland). These ships were so expensive, representing so much of a national investment, that their loss in large numbers (especially in a single day’s fighting) would have been regarded as a national calamity. It thus became more important for the dreadnoughts on each side to remain afloat than for them to sink their enemy counterparts. This led each side to avoid risking these ships in combat unless they were convinced that they had a special advantage which greatly increased the chances of victory (usually meaning a situation in which side X felt that it could lure side Y into a trap). I think it was Winston Chruchill who summed up the situation by saying that Admiral Jellicoe was the only man in Britain who could lose the war in an afternoon.
