A to Z Challenge: Gloval, Henry

Even in the books there isn't tons about Henry Gloval's early years.  Basically he's from what was then the Soviet Union, he captained an aircraft carrier in the Global Civil War, and he was part of the team to explore the crashed SDF-1.  Then he was given command of the ship.

The SDF-1 was supposed to go on a shakedown cruise, but the arrival of a Zentraedi war fleet put the kaibosh on those plans.  Instead there was a struggle just to get the ship airborne when the gravity pods supposed to get the ship off the ground failed and they had to rely on good old-fashioned rocket power.

While Gloval was a good man and most of the time a decent captain, he made a couple of strategic errors.  The first was lowering the SDF-1 over Macross City before making its ill-fated space fold.  Instead of jumping to the moon, the ship (and most of Macross) ended up stranded by Pluto.  It was a move that forced tens of thousands of civilians to become refugees and killed thousands more.  But I suppose the excuse is that he didn't really know how the fold system worked; it was the ship's first jump.

Gloval had a plan for a counterattack around Saturn, but everything went to shit when the main gun wouldn't work.  It was only a clever plan by Lisa Hayes that saved the day.  It was Lisa again who saved the ship when Gloval set down on Mars and it was trapped by Zentraedi gravity mines.

Captain Henry Gloval

On Earth, Gloval finally found a home for the Macross refugees in Canada.  But when the Zentraedi attacked, he opted to use the new barrier system to shield the ship instead of the SDF-1's main gun.  When the barrier overloaded, it killed tens of thousands in Ontario and the refugees were stuck aboard the ship.

So those were not exactly the best moments, but otherwise he was pretty capable given the circumstances.  After the battle with Dolza, Gloval was sort of the unofficial president of Earth for a while during the reconstruction.  But he was getting up there in years, so Lisa Hayes was to command the SDF-2.  Which is why when Khyron's battlecruiser is heading towards the SDF-1 and SDF-2, Gloval, Claudia Grant, and the rest put Lisa into the only working escape pod.  And so Gloval is killed along with most of his bridge crew.

As something prescient for its time, there was frequently a conflict on the bridge about Gloval lighting up his pipe.  I don't think in the mid-80s it was still that big of a deal to smoke in military areas.