A while back I finished off Andrew Gordon's The Rules of the Game, which is digressive but fascinating, and from what I remember during the early stages of the battle the Germans had better visibility, and in general their gunnery was very good. I need to dig that book out again. I don't recall any mention of German reaction to the destruction of the battlecruisers, if anything I remember reading that they didn't realise they were gone.
Without the sudden loss of two capital ships and over two thousand personnel the aftermath however would have been far more favourable for the Royal Navy. Instead of a major controversy, with the Germans arguing that they had won, Jutland would probably be remembered as an inconclusive large-scale "might have been".
Ah, I've dug out The Rules of the Game. It seems that the battle began just as the Royal Navy was preparing to have tea, and the captain of Warspite was upset when the executive officer sounded action stations instead of a more general alert, because the captain wanted to get tea out of the way first. The captain of New Zealand went into battle wearing a Maori pendant that had been presented to the ship by a Maori chieftain; he was unable to put on a Maori skirt because he was too large, but "he kept it close at hand, 'ready to put on should things become too hot'".
Of the gunnery Gordon says that "Hipper's pale-grey ships blended well against the lowering overcast to the east, and the British, overestimating the range, waiting too long before opening fire. It was the Germans who broke the tension, at 3.45 GMT, at about 18,500 yards and closing fast". Furthermore the wind was blowing west-to-east, which meant that German gunsmoke immediately passed over their ships and away, whereas British gunsmoke obscured the German ships from the British gunners - but the converse was not true, because the Germans had better optics and could range on the tips of the British warships' masts.
The Germans got off to a terrific start and I wonder how things might have gone if their guns were a couple of inches bigger, even if the British followed regulations to a T. Re-reading that part of the book it strikes me that for all the opprobrium directed at Beatty, in the space of less than an hour his ship sustained a near-catastrophic hit and two of his other ships blew up with the loss of over a thousand sailors each, but he didn't panic and carried on directing his part of the battle and eventually brought his ship home. Iron men indeed.
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