erman withdrawal was helped by a thaw, which turned roads behind the British front into bogs and by disruption to the railways which supplied the Somme front. On the night of 12 March the Germans withdrew from the R. I Stellung between Bapaume and Achiet le Petit and the British reached the R. II Stellung (R. II Position) on 13 March.
The Royal British Legion with the British Embassy in Paris and the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, commemorate the battle on 1 July each year, at the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme. For their efforts on the first day of the battle, The 1st Newfoundland Regiment was given the name "The Royal Newfoundland Regiment" by George V on 28 November 1917. The first day of the Battle of the Somme is commemorated in Newfoundland, remembering the "Best of the Best" at 11:00 a.m. on the Sunday nearest to 1 July. The Somme is remembered in Northern Ireland due to the participation of the 36th (Ulster) Division and commemorated by veterans' groups and by unionist/Protestant groups such as the Orange Order. During the Northern Irish Troubles the date was associated primarily with the Orange Order and regarded by some as part of the 'marching season', with connection to the Somme. The British Legion and others commemorate the battle on 1 July.
Since the 1960s the "futility" view, that the battle was an Anglo-French disaster has been criticised as a myth. In recent years a nuanced version of the original orthodoxy has arisen, which does not seek to minimise the human cost of the battle but sets it in the context of industrial warfare, compares it to the wars in the United States from 1861–1865 and Europe from 1939–1945 and describes the development of the armies of 1914 into modern all-arms organisations, using the scientific application of fire-power on land and in the air, to defeat comparable opponents in a war of exhaustion. Little German and French writing has been translated, leaving much of the continental perspective and detail of German and French military operations inaccessible to the English-speaking world.
Haig and General Rawlinson have been criticised ever since 1916 for the human cost of the battle and for failing to achieve their territorial objectives. On 1 August 1916 Winston Churchill criticised the British Army's conduct of the offensive to the British Cabinet, claiming that though the battle had forced the Germans to end their offensive at Verdun, attrition was damaging the British armies more than the German armies. Though Churchill was unable to suggest an alternative, a critical view of the British on the Somme has been influential in English-language writing ever since.
A rival conclusion by some historians (Terraine, Sheffield, Duffy, Chickering, Herwig and Philpott et al.) is that there was no strategic alternative for the British in 1916 and that an understandable horror at British losses is insular, given the millions of casualties borne by the French and Russian armies since 1914. This school of thought sets the battle in a context of a general Allied offensive in 1916 and notes that German and French writing on the battle puts it in a continental perspective. The Battle of the Somme has been called the beginning of modern all-arms warfare, during which Kitchener's Army learned to fight the mass-industrial war, which the continental armies had been engaged in for two years. This view sees the British contribution to the battle as part of a coalition war and part of a process, which took the strategic initiative from the German Army and caused it irreparable damage, leading to its collapse in late 1918.
- Despite the certainty by mid-June, of an Anglo-French attack on the Somme against the Second Army, Falkenhayn sent only four divisions, keeping eight in the western strategic reserve. No divisions were moved from the Sixth Army, despite it holding a shorter line with 17 1⁄2 divisions and three of the reserve divisions in the Sixth Army area. The maintenance of the strength of the Sixth Army, at the expense of the Second Army on the Somme, indicated that Falkeh