Remember Tony Blair saying sorry for the potato famine, or Bill Clinton’s expression of “regret” for slavery? Official apologies are only worth something when they signify a determination to behave differently. The only reason for an Irishman to go without potatoes today is the Atkins diet, and African-Americans long ago cast off their chains These apologies were empty gestures and nothing more

Apologies for historical events are often ridiculous. These apologies were empty gestures and nothing more.
So why do I believe that Elizabeth Windsor should apologise – during her state visit this week – to the people of Dresden for the destruction of their city in 1945? Even the lunatic fringe of UKIP do not actually want to bomb Germany again. But the levelling of Dresden was a symptom of something much larger – a belief in the doctrine of total war – and that belief is creeping back into the practice of Britain and her allies today.The doctrine of total war is simple.

It is the belief that when you are at war, anything and everything is a legitimate target Target civilians in enemy countries? No problem. Blow up reservoirs and destroy the means for civilian life? Bombs away. There are no rules and there can be no restraint.Dresden was the marriage of this doctrine to vast air-power. When Air Marshal Arthur Harris launched the assault on Dresden, he knew it was a city of 600,000 ordinary German civilians and at least 250,000 refugees. The historian John Black explains: “There were no military objectives of any consequence in the city.

Its destruction could do nothing to weaken the Nazi war machine.”Many of the RAF pilots were horrified when they were ordered to kill 40,000 women, children, old people and refugees as an end in itself. Roy Akehurst, a wireless operator who took part in the killings, explained: “We were just flying for hours over a sheet of fire I found myself making comments to the crew ‘Oh God, these poor people.’ It was completely uncalled for. You can’t justify it.”The son of one late serviceman, David Pedlow, has explained: “Normally, crews were given a strategic aiming point – anything from a factory to a railway junction – to target. Only at the Dresden briefing, the crews were given no strategic aiming point. They were simply told anywhere within the built-up area of the city would serve. [My father] felt that Dresden’s civilian population was the target and their deaths served no strategic purpose, even in the widest terms. It was a significant departure from accepting civilian deaths as a regrettable but inevitable consequence of the bomber war.”He was right: there is a clear moral line between the civilian deaths that occur in the pursuit of any just war and deliberately slaughtering them for its own sake The destruction of Dresden crossed this line Don’t take my word for it.

Winston Churchill later issued a memo to Harris questioning his Dresden strategy, describing the bombings as “mere acts of terror and wanton destruction”. When shown aerial photographs of the bomb sites – images that resemble the surface of the moon – he expressed his fear that we had become “beasts”.Yet in this country, whenever we try to discuss anything about Europe – never mind Germany – our brains melt into a gooey Euro-hating sludge. So it’s no surprise that the difficult moral debate about Britain’s bombing of Dresden in 1945 has been immediately misrepresented. One right-wing newspaper declared on its front page this Saturday: “The Queen refuses to say sorry for war.”Let’s get this clear: only a neo-Nazi or an extreme pacifist would suggest Britain should apologise for the war. It is a wild distortion to suggest that the German press today is calling for it. The Second World War was one of the most morally necessary wars ever fought.