Perhaps a second-order apology would do:

"We deeply regret the failures of judgment and will in various quarters following the First World War that made necessary many terrible decisions in the Second."

Apologize? Yes, it is a Krautrage.

This would be like the United States apologizing to the Confederacy for Atlanta. You started it, you didn't have the good sense to end it when you were beaten, and you want the people who were forced to pound you into submission to apologize. Maybe you Krauts should contemplate how the war would have ended if your values had been our values.

The next thing you know those people are going to be asking for a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council.

Now let's think about what this "apologize for bombing" line means for the continuation of American hegemony.

As the Germans and their buddies found out, democracies can fight, and fight better and smarter than dictatorships. What they will not do is tolerate unnecessary casulties. Necessary casulties merely steel our resolve. Without strategic bombing, the dictatorships can force us to swap body counts with them, which, as Vietnam demonstrated, we will not do.

Now the continued development of precision guided munitions is making our way of war even stronger than it had been, but nations need to understand that if they are taken into war with the United States by their agressor regime they have a heavy price to pay.

"As the Germans and their buddies found out, democracies can fight, and fight better and smarter than dictatorships. "

Weelll, WW2 was essentially a war where communist Russia defeated fascist Germany.

Other than that what you said is gold.

Would the Reds have fared so well without Lend-Lease?

Nope. Allied aid was essential to their war effort. But they engaged the bulk of Germany's divisions, inflicted 80% of the Wehrmacht's casualties and suffered tremendous losses themselves.

M Ali: Except the USSR's credit should be canceled out by the fact that they allied with the Nazis to start the war in '39 and fought with them until '41.

US (reading, Japanese ambassador to Germany, Baron Oshima's diplomatic reports to Tokyo because we broke the Japanese code) and UK (who broke the German code) intelligence provided to the Russians were also vital to the Soviets. Without them, many Soviet victories would never have happened.

M Ali: Except the USSR's credit should be canceled out by the fact that they allied with the Nazis to start the war in '39 and fought with them until '41.

Welcome to the Wonderful World of Old European Power Politics.

Who wants to be reconciled to the Germans?

I suggest the Queen respond to the request as General MacAuliffe did at Bastogne: 'Nuts!'

That's not the word he really used.

I agree, though, she could respond as he did.

Something along the lines of

'We apologize for not firebombing your other cities the way we did Dresden, you obnoxious Kraut bastards. By even considering for a nanosecond that we should even think of apologizing to you for doing what we had to do to win a war you started, you show that you have managed somehow to be so Teutonically thick-headed as to have learned nothing from getting a serious butt-whupping twice in one century,'

should just about do it.

The Germans already have a Security Council Permanent seat, but for some reason they let the French vote it for them.

All this unvarnished Vansittartism must be unwelcome to mein host.

Harry:

Why? What has refusing to apologise for Dresden got to do with attitudes to modern Germany? Would you look more favourably as apologising to the Italians?

This all has to do with the European psychological need to re-cast history in order to forestall any opposition to the march to EU supremacy. Vikings were really commercial innovaters, Napoleon was an early pan-European and everybody in the world wars was equally bad, bad, bad. It's all part of the "history as error" philosophy, which I believe you find attractive at times.

Dresden was a war crime.

However, I cannot see any way for the British to apologize for it, given the larger context in which it happened.

Eugene:

That's a very tough case to make, unless you take the expansive view that the whole war was a crime.

The Queen should simply say - "are you moving towards my throat? We like you better the other way".

Vansittartism on this blog, Peter. I agree, there's not enough of it in Europe, never was.

But 'mein host' refers to Orrin. He likes Germans.