NBC usage at Loum/Side 5

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doghunter1
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NBC usage at Loum/Side 5

Aside from Tomino's Setting Notes, where else was usage of NBC (Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical) weapons was used in Loum, which led to why the Side ended up trashed in the crossfire?
toysdream
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Re: NBC usage at Loum/Side 5

The support for this is surprisingly thin in the Japanese sources.

Our previous threads about the early part of the war tend to focus either on the One Week Battle (like this one) or look at Loum purely from the standpoint of fleet numbers and tactics. I think we tended to skip over the question of what happened to Loum's colonies because the Japanese sources tend to do that too.

In MS Igloo and the animated Origin, the colonies aren't shown at all during the battle. Even in the Origin comic, the damage to the colonies is limited to a diversionary attack on their spaceports led by Char, and we're told that Garma and his ground forces went in after the battle and basically hunted down all the people. And yet in First Gundam, Side 5 is a "shoal zone" filled with debris and colony fragments, with Texas seemingly the only intact colony. So something must have physically happened to the other colonies!

The timelines in the Japanese publications generally say that Loum was destroyed in the battle, and huge numbers of people (in some versions, 3.5 billion!) were killed, but the accompanying text generally doesn't provide any other details. The most detailed account I can think of is in Entertainment Bible 39, which starts with the theory (first described in Gundam Century and since rejected by MS Igloo and The Origin) that Zeon was attempting to begin a second colony drop using one of the Side 5 colonies. EB 39 says that Zeon's mobile suits used nuclear bazookas against the Federation's warships, and ends by mentioning that Side 5 was entirely destroyed, and 2 billion people killed. A few days later, Dozle accompanies Degwin on an inspection of the battlefield, and brags to his father that the damage to the colonies was inflicted by their mobile suits.

As far as I can recall, that's the closest we've been given to an explanation of what happened to the colonies - they were destroyed in the crossfire as Zeon's mobile suits attacked the Federation ships with nuclear weapons. In versions of the battle where there's no close fighting within the Side, or the Zakus aren't packing nukes, we'd need a different explanation.

-- Mark
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MythSearcher
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Re: NBC usage at Loum/Side 5

Well, even Gundam Officials only mentioned Loum was destroyed in the battle.
However, it should be noted that Zeon forces not only went to Loum looking for a suitable colony to drop, Gundam Officials used the word "Annihilate"(殲滅) for the mission of Zeon forces getting into Side 5, making it sound like they intended on destroying the side to begin with. What weapons they used to do so is not clearly stated, but since it was specifically stated that NBC weapons were used at the beginning of One Week Battle for destroying colonies in Side 1, 2 and 4, it would be reasonable to assume they used the same tactics on Side 5.(it works, why not?)
toysdream
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Re: NBC usage at Loum/Side 5

The account in Gundam Officials is pretty much just a paraphrase of Entertainment Bible 39 (which is understandable since it was the most complete one published at that point). However, as we've discussed in previous Loum threads - so many previous Loum threads! - the "second colony drop" explanation proposed in Gundam Century, embellished by EB 39, and recycled in Gundam Officials isn't supported by later Sunrise works like MS Igloo and the Origin animation.

In fact, MS Igloo even goes so far as to call the second colony drop a hoax - false intelligence deliberately leaked by Zeon to lure the Federation fleet into a planned ambush. While that does help reconcile the conflicting published accounts, it still leaves us without a reason for any fighting to take place within Side 5. All we're left with is the idea that, after driving away the Federation fleet, the victorious Zeon forces went into the defenseless Side 5 and took their sweet time blowing up all the colonies one by one with nuclear warheads. Maybe for target practice? I dunno, that seems absolutely psychotic even for Zeon.


But here's something that occurs to me. One of the unique traits of Side 5 is that, since it's right in front of the moon, it's essentially sitting on Zeon's doorstep. Presumably that's the reason why, in some versions of the Loum narrative, the Federation had kept a huge fleet parked there since the beginning of the war. As such, it seems like it would present a dangerous vulnerability for the Zeon homeland; from a strategic standpoint, someone like Gihren might well argue that it should be destroyed to deprive the Federation of a possible base.

Indeed, in the narration of First Gundam episode 37, we're told that the Texas Colony "was left alone because it had no military significance." Which rather suggests that the other Side 5 colonies did.

It's possible that, if they intended to destroy the physical colonies and faced no Federation opposition, the victorious Zeons might give the Side 5 population a deadline to evacuate and let them become refugees - the kind of people for whom 0083's Colony Reclamation Plan was intended, and who are still living in makeshift refugee colonies like Sweetwater a decade later. That would explain the destruction of the colonies, and also help justify why the other Spacenoids don't simply lynch Zeons on sight for the rest of the Universal Century.

None of this is supported by a shred of animated or published evidence, of course - it's purely a crackpot theory that just popped into my head. But 35 years after First Gundam, we still have no idea what happened to Side 5, so I think it's justifiable to start speculating. :-)

-- Mark
excalibur2008
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Re: NBC usage at Loum/Side 5

toysdream wrote: the victorious Zeon forces went into the defenseless Side 5 and took their sweet time blowing up all the colonies one by one with nuclear warheads. Maybe for target practice? I dunno, that seems absolutely psychotic even for Zeon.
On the other hand taking Char pretty much saying Zeon would destroy Side 6 if they sided with the federation its not that far out of the realm of possibility.
teslashark
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Re: NBC usage at Loum/Side 5

I thought Dozle bragged about the EF ships being scattered by his Zakus, not the colonies? It has been some time since I last played a Ghiren series game.
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nickh46
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Re: NBC usage at Loum/Side 5

I was reading Vol 9 of the Origin, where Sayla confronts her brother, saying that after the punks attacked the Mass residence, they had to watch the rest of their "country" burn. To which Char said that he was the one who convinced the higher-ups not to attack Texas Colony, out of concern for her safety.
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zetatype
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Re: NBC usage at Loum/Side 5

nickh46 wrote:I was reading Vol 9 of the Origin, where Sayla confronts her brother, saying that after the punks attacked the Mass residence, they had to watch the rest of their "country" burn. To which Char said that he was the one who convinced the higher-ups not to attack Texas Colony, out of concern for her safety.
You know, one has to wonder how Char manged to convince Zeon's militray leaders not to attack the Texas Colony considering that he was pretty much a nobody before the Battle of Loum. Would have been nice if The Origin showed us how he managed to convince them.
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Dendrobium Stamen
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Re: NBC usage at Loum/Side 5

zetatype wrote:You know, one has to wonder how Char manged to convince Zeon's militray leaders not to attack the Texas Colony considering that he was pretty much a nobody before the Battle of Loum. Would have been nice if The Origin showed us how he managed to convince them.
It is mildly frustrating that we don't see that detail, but in this continuity, he probably placed the idea in Garma's head, and Garma then convinced Dozle that attacking Side 5 directly was a waste of time?
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