The History of the Horrific War That Gundam Built Itself On

Almost every episode of the original Mobile Suit Gundam opens with a reminder, and a warning. A stoic narrator informs us that it is the year 0079 of the Universal Century, and that humanity has spent the last nine months locked in an interstellar war between the forces of the Earth Federation and the Principality of Zeon, a group of space colonies that has declared independence to rebel against governance from their home planet.

Or really, they’ve spent much of that period in a stalemate that is only broken by the events of the show itself. Up to that point, only the first month of the conflict—the “One Year War,” as it would be enshrined in Gundam‘s history to come—had actually seen any fighting. That’s where the warning comes in, a lesson repeated episode after episode: in that single month, half of all humanity had perished. The conflict’s stalemate hadn’t been caused by strategic acumen or military advancement. Humankind had simply obliterated itself in a manner of weeks, enacting horror upon horror on itself.

Prelude to War

Growing discontent at the direct control Earth had on the space colonies—divided across the Lagrange points of the Earth-Moon system into 7 “Sides”, each with their own names and administrative branches—had been simmering for decades before the outbreak of open war. Twenty years prior, Side 3, the furthest of the colonies, declared independence from the Earth Federation, naming itself the Republic of Zeon for its leader, Zeon Zum Deikun. Deikun was a foremost believer in a philosophy known as “Contolism,” a synthetization of environmentalist and nationalist belief that argued that not only did humanity’s evolutionary future lie in life in space beyond the cradle of Earth, but that the nascent colonial system had the right to self-governance away from the yoke of the Federation.

But Deikun’s mysterious death in 0068—and the rise of the Zabi family, lead by patriarch Degwin Zabi, to replace him—radically drew Zeon in a more militaristic direction. Declaring itself a sovereign principality under Zabi, the colony went into full-scale mobilization for conflict with earth, developing advancements in new technology to supplement its naval and ground forces: the Zaku, the first bipedal humanoid Mobile Suit designed explicitly designed for conflict. Although the technology had previously advanced the proliferation of civilian “Mobile Worker” units, military applications of mobile suit technology had been dismissed at the time by the Earth Federation, believing that the overwhelming strength of its own naval forces would deter Zeon from going beyond its displays of nationalist strength… a belief that would very quickly be proven futile.

The One Month War

Zeon declared war on January 3, 0079, almost immediately launching attacks on the nearest colonies of Side 1, 2 and 4. Almost immediately, the Zaku (namely its successor, the Zaku-II) proved a major advantage for Zeon’s assaults, overwhelming traditional capital ships with their maneuvrability. But the opening of the conflict was not initially defined by the deployment of Mobile Suits, but instead Zeon’s liberal use of nuclear and biological weapons of mass destruction.

Millions upon millions were killed in the opening days of the war as colonies were filled with poison gas, and in an early direct assault at Earth, Zeon instigated “Operation British”—the launch of a now-depopulated space colony cylinder into Earth’s atmosphere, attempting to destroy Federation command’s headquarters at Jaburo in South America. Although surviving Federation forces failed to stop Zeon from launching the colony drop, Operation British was only a pyrrhic victory: Jaburo went unharmed as the colony broke up in-atmosphere, with the remaining largest remnant redirecting and landing on Sydney, wiping the city out and causing terrifying ecological damage in its aftermath.

In a desperate counterattack, General Revil rallied the remnants of the Federation fleet to stop Zeon from instigating a second colony drop at Side 5, known as Loum, beginning the first open fleet battle in space in human history. Again, Zeon’s use of weapons of mass destruction proved too overwhelming to bear—Loum was completely destroyed by nuclear bombardment. But the battle also proved the hubris of the Federation’s dismissal of mobile suit warfare, with the rise of a series of Zeon ace pilots who made their name in the conflict (including Char Aznable, dubbed the “Red Comet” for his personalized Zaku, and in actuality the son of Deikun operating under a pseudonym). The Federation fleet was decimated by Zeon’s mobile suit forces, and Revil himself was captured.

Just weeks after the war began, the loss of life on both sides was inconceivable. The Earth Federation and Zeon met in Antarctica for peace talks, with the Federation itself on the brink of acquiescing to total surrender—but the liberation of Revil from Zeon custody, who exposed the impact the war was beginning to have on Zeon’s forces, even with their overwhelming success up to this point, rallied Federation command to instead negotiate not a total end to fighting, but new terms of war. The Antarctic Treaty would formally forbid nuclear, biological, and chemical weaponry from being deployed, as well as the use of colonies as weapons of mass destruction, as well as establish guidelines for the humane treatment of prisoners of war and enshrine several colonies’ neutrality.

Project V: The Turning Point

Although Zeon signed the Antarctic Treaty, it still held a massive advantage over the remnant forces of the Earth Federation thanks to its mobile suits. By March of 0079, Zeon had begun dropping ground forces and mobile suit divisions directly on Earth, and within months Zeon controlled vast swaths of the planet, occupying the Federation’s own military industrial complex across the West Coast of America to resupply and maintain their armies.

As the Federation’s ground forces resorted to guerrilla tactics to combat Zeon’s mechanized units on Earth, in secret in the stars work begun on a two-pronged operation to redevelop the Federation navy. The ultimate breakthrough was Project V, a research operation to finally develop military mobile suits for the Earth Federation, alongside weaponry to match. The three mobile suits developed under Project V–the long-ranged, track-based artillery platform Guntank, the bipedal support suit Guncannon, and the close-quarters combat-specialized suit, Gundam—would make use of compacted beam weaponry based on the batteries used by the Federation’s capital ships, a major technological development that outgunned the ballistic weaponry of the Zaku, while retaining the maneuvrability advantages mobile suits had over fleet combat.

Although the fruits of Project V’s labor were nearly scuppered when Zeon forces discovered the prototype suits, as well as the newly-developed Pegasus-class carrier “White Base” transporting them at Side 7 in September of 0079, the early deployment of the Gundam in combat by the civilian son of one of the lead researchers on Project V, Amuro Ray, would change the tide of the war in the Federation’s favor. Operating from the White Base with a mix of military and civilian personnel drafted from refugees of Zeon’s attack on Side 7, Ray would lead a vanguard that would see the Gundam carve a path through Zeon forces back to Earth, playing a major role in the liberation of key Federation facilities across the Americas and helping advance Federation forces back into Europe and Asia as part of Operation Odessa.

By December, the success of the White Base’s various campaigns and the increasing deployment of a new range of Federation mobile suits in the RGM-79 line (known as “Jims”) saw the Federation successfully launch a new space fleet from Jaburo, pushing into Zeon’s defensive lines in space. Military defeats at the asteroid fortress Solomon and internal infighting among leading members of the Zabi family left Zeon’s military operations pushed to the brink, until eventually, on New Year’s Eve itself, the One Year War would come to end at the Battle of A Baoa Qu, Zeon’s final remaining asteroid base. With the deaths of much of the Zabi leadership and the scattering of Zeon’s remnant forces, on January 1, 0080—just two days shy of the anniversary of Zeon’s declaration of war—Zeon restored its republic status and formally surrendered, bringing an end to the One Year War.

The Legacy of the One Year War

The One Year War has ramifications that reverberate through the rest of Gundam‘s transformation from its unlikely roots to a legendary anime franchise over the next 45 years. Beyond the impact it directly has on the shows and spinoffs in the Universal Century timeline that come after the original Gundam—setting the stage for generations of conflict to come—parallels to the One Year War and the sheer devastation it represented have informed the franchise’s similarly ceaseless examination of the cycles of conflict, and the human cost that sits at the heart of it. But it’s also a period that Gundam seemingly cannot escape, even as it continues to advance: time and time again, OVAs, movies, spinoff manga and novels, and more have found ways to cram more and more story into that wartime period, to constantly revisit that iconography and setting directly, rather than simply echoing it.

And now, nearly a half century after we first learned of it, Gundam prepares to revisit it once more in new light in its latest incarnation, GQuuuuuuX. Set in the aftermath of an alternative version of the Universal Century where Zeon ultimately won the war, GQuuuuuuX is having it in both ways compared to most Gundam entries echoing of the franchise’s most famous conflict. It’s an opportunity to directly revisit and retell that story once more, while pushing it in new directions, and starting to extrapolate what could’ve come beyond it if things had gone a different way. In many way, it’s perhaps the ultimate expression of what the franchise might still have to say about it all, all these years later—but it would be naive to think that this latest revisitation is the final word on the conflict that shaped Gundam into what it is.

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