WWII is full of plot holes and is poorly written

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I have serious problems with the Ichi-no-Tani and Dan-no-ura episodes in the Genpei War story arc. Let's start with how flagrantly ridiculous Yoshitsune's strategy at Ichi-no-Tani is. You can't just send cavalry gallivanting off into the mountains and then have them charge down the slopes at your enemy's position, especially mountains like the ones above the Suma Shore. The whole thing was just entirely too dynamic on the Minamoto's part for what was supposed to be a siege action, and the only reason fans like the episode so much is because it has that scene with Kumagai and Atsumori that keeps getting all of those symbolic callbacks in Japan-centric arcs in later seasons. If they could have taken that scene and somehow incorporated it into one of the better episodes in that arc, like say the Siege of Nara (Shigehira's a really interesting and simultaneously horrifying and tragic character and I wish they wrote more like him), that'd be perfect.

My issue with Dan-no-ura is the way it ended. Most of the battle was fairly good and well-foreshadowed in that the Taira spent like the whole season after Ichi-no-Tani fleeing further and further down the coast and once you get to Shimonoseki there's not a whole hell of a lot of other places to try to go if you don't leave the country entirely. That's not my problem. Even Taguchi betraying the Taira didn't entirely surprise me. That's not my problem either. That guy was a jerk in the first place. My problem is the part where the Emperor dies. It's ridiculously unnecessary and cruel; Emperor Antoku was six years old and had the Three Sacred Treasures with him, for God's sake.