"...The greatest problem encountered was that of correctly installing the radios with proper wiring, shielding and grounding of the equipment. It seems that little attention was devoted to this problem until late in the war. Insufficient shielding of the ignition system of the aircraft caused interference with reception of signals to a great degree, as did static charges generated by the passage of the airframe through the atmosphere. It seems that there were very few officers at fighter group level who were familiar with radio systems or who cared to conduct effective programs to maintain them. The resulting poor performance quickly led fighter pilots to cease using the radios and resort to the old visual methods. In the case of some land-based groups, they removed all radio equipment to enhance the performance of the planes..."
That made complete sense. It sounds like they made the radios in a vacuum where they were simply handed to the aircraft manufacturer who shoehorned them in somewhere, and did it poorly. No shielding! That must have been frustrating in the extreme, especially to a culture that viewed them as a flimsy impediment towards fulfilling their manly Bushido code.
We had somewhat the same attitude towards radar directed naval gunfire, but Admiral Willis "Ching" Lee made his peers see the light, especially after the terrible defeat at Savo Island opened their minds to anything that could help.
Thanks, that was one of the most interesting war-related things I have read in a while, and that makes complete sense.
A lot of that in turn can be traced back to the RFP that created the A6M. The A6M was the result of a government requirement for a new carrier fighter possessing performance specifications that were conventionally unachievable in a normal balanced design. They wanted long range, high speed, fast climb, high maneuverability and 20mm cannon armament. Most of the Japanese aircraft industry took a look at the requirements and noped out of it. Mitsubishi Heavy Industries looked at the specs and realized that they could actually meet all of them if they made the plane as light as possible. They literally were shaving every ounce they could off the aircraft to meet the requirements - and besides the deletion of self-sealing fuel tanks and pilot-protecting armor, the ignition wires had only just enough metal shielding to prevent crosstalk in the quest to save weight - which is where the interference with the radios came in. The radios, as noted in the prior link, were specially made to be as lightweight as possible (no shielding) as well, so that didn’t help either.
This is why the Japanese had serious problems trying to counter US aerial tactics like the Thatch Weave (they never really did come up with a solid counter to it) and they never were really able to implement the Weave in their own air forces. The Weave required either personnel who had trained with each other to the point where they were almost telepathic - or working radios. At Midway, the Japanese lost most of their hardened combat vet pilots that could do the former so they had an uphill struggle to implement that.
The closest they came to a good counter was using energy conservation tactics, barrel rolls and constant, radical yawing/slipping to try to exploit their airspeed advantage. They also tried to go for the altitude advantage at all times (as did most pilots) but it was more like an obsession with the Japanese, particularly post Midway. The Zero had maximum advantage over any other type in a diving attack, particularly in the late war when the heavy, armored American fighters had so many performance upgrades they were easily able to pace the Zero. The Japanese did change from their three-aircraft formations to use a US style fingers four or 2+2 minimum formation, but by the time that became common for the Japanese, US equipment and training upgrades were coming fast and furious - and US pilots knew how to exploit the disadvantages of fingers four, high-low and 2+2.
Related reading - a transcribed and annotated lecture from one of the few veteran Zero pilots that survived the war. He comments about the poor radio performance and the fact that they couldn’t change frequencies in flight unlike American radios: http://www.j-aircraft.com/research/naoaki_ooishi/My_Aviation_Experience.pdf