How to Fight a War

Gerald Sittser’s book chronicles the tension among American churches at the eve of America’s entrance into WWII.  According to Sittser, the interventionist moral and political argument eventually won out (helped greatly by Reinhold Niebuhr).  However, I was left wondering if this debate continued to play out throughout the war.  It’s one thing to reach a consensus that intervention was a political necessity, but was there a subsequent debate over how the war should be fought?  Looking back at WWII, it is clear that it was a total war, one that blurred the lines between civilians and combatants.  Was this clear from the eve of the war?   It seems like the logical extension of much of the intervention argument: if Western civilization was indeed at stake, then a “Christian realist” might argue that it was morally right to do what was necessary to protect it.  But did this “Christian realism” have humanitarian limits, and if so, how could they be identified?  Did it justify the bombing of civilians, if such actions could bring a faster end to the war?  And, at the most extreme of these examples, could it ever be used to justify the use of the nuclear bomb?