Zentradi War

The Zentradi War, named for its primary non-human belligerents, began in early 0058 and ended (depending on how you demarcate ending) in late 0058 or early 0059, though hostilities continued in fits and spurts with remnant Zentradi factions until 0060. The Zentradi correctly identified the SDF-1 Macross as a Supervision Army gunboat, though it did not recognize that it had been commandeered by a species with no idea what a Supervision Army was, and the two sides fought until an understanding was reached thanks to the power of song. The Zentradi managed to kill roughly 1.1 billion humans during their final bombardment of Earth.

Due to the several mass death events of the latter half of the Universal Century, cultural memory of the finer points of the Zentradi War are imperfect. The most commonly-known record, an 0076 film (recently remade for its 20th anniversary) titled Do You Remember Love?, gets numerous details on Zentradi society direly wrong but has received extensive praise for the accuracy of its depictions of Zentradi tactical formations and materiel.