Military Strategy: Robert Massie on Admiral John Jellicoe’s perhaps accurate fear at the Battle of Jutland that he was in fact bluffing—that the German High Seas Fleet the British Grand Fleet was confronting was the superior battlefleet:

Robert Massie: Castles of Steel: ‘Jellicoe's pessimistic arithmetic and cautious hoarding were subject to criticism during and after the war. But he refused to give way, knowing that the gray ships stretched out in lines at Scapa Flow were the primary defense of the nation. Nor was this all. Jellicoe knew or suspected something that Churchill did not know and that Jacky Fisher would never admit: vessel for vessel, German ships were better constructed (5 words) than British ships. It was Jellicoe's conviction, derived from years at the Admiralty and considerable experience with the German navy, that in matters such as armor plating, underwater protection, watertight subdivision of compartments, gunnery control, and some types of shells, the British fleet was inferior to the German. If so, the Grand Fleet was not the overwhelmingly superior weapon the country, Churchill, and many in the navy believed it to be… <books.google.com/books?pg=PT375&hl=en&n…

Churchill admittedly did recognize that Admiral Jellicoe was “the only who could lose… [WWI] in an afternoon”:

Winston Churchill: The World Crisis, vol. 3: ‘The standpoint of the Commander-in-Chief of the British Grand Fleet was unique…. It might fall to him as to no other…to issue orders which in the space of two or three hours might nakedly decide who won the war…. Jellicoe was the only man on either side who could lose the war in an afternoon. First… stood the determination not to hazard the Battle Fleet. The risk of under-water damage by torpedo and mine, and the consequent destruction of British battleship superiority, under-water lay heavy upon him. It far outweighed all considerations of the results on either side of gunfire. It was the main preoccupation of Admiralty thought before the war… <play.google.com/books/reader?pg=GBS.PR1…>

But Churchill thought that in their fears the British Admiralty were scared of their own shadows. Churchill never recognized the quite possible superiority of Germany’s High Seas Fleet as a battlefleet. But Jellicoe must have. After the explosions and sinkings of the Indefatigable, Queen Mary, and Invincible it would have been a rash Grand Fleet commanding admiral indeed who did not worry about the same vulnerabilities in at least some of his battleships proper.