1962: The Apocalypse

' History would gradually diverge from 1959 to 1962. '

'It would completely split after the war. '

'This is a list of events that lead to Doomsday 1962. '

1958-59


From mid-1957 through 1959 incidents of violence increased in South Vietnam. The Vietnam War officaly began in 1959 with an uprising by Viet Cong forces supplied by North Vietnam.

While the war in Indochina was being fought out between the Vietnamese and the French, Thailand stay neutral, but once it became a war between the U.S. and the Vietnamese Communists, Thailand committed itself strongly to the U.S. side, concluding a secret agreement with the U.S. in 1961, sending troops to Vietnam and Laos, and allowing the U.S. to open airbases in the east of the country to conduct its bombing war against North Vietnam.The Vietnam War hastened the modernisation and westernisation of Thai society. The population began to grow explosively as the standard of living rose and North Vietnam became both fightend and jealous of the Thais.

The Oubangui-Chari (or Ubangi-Shari), was a French colonial territory in the southern half of today's Central African Republic. On 1 December 1958. The founding father and president of the nation's Conseil de Gouvernement, Barthélémy Boganda, died in a mysterious plane accident in 1959, just eight days before the last elections of the colonial era. Anti-colonial rebels took to the streets as an Cholera outbreak in the River Chari killed 40 in the Summer of 1959. France intervenes and averts any further suffering. The Soviets offer their support and several crates of medicinal, pistols and bullets to the anti-colonial and left-wing rebels.

1960
Upon his father's death in 1960, Prince Norodom Sihanouk again became head of state, taking the title of prince. As the Vietnam War progressed, Cambodia official policy of neutrality in the Cold War, although is was generally sympathetic to the communist cause.

Laos would be unwillingly dragged into the Vietnam War by 1960 as in reality, due to a Laotian coup in the end of the year and the location of the newly opened Ho Chi Minh Trail. The eastern parts of the country followed North Vietnam felt more akin to it. Laos also allowed North Vietnam to use its land as a supply route for its war against the South. In response, the United States initiated a bombing campaign against the North Vietnamese, supported regular and irregular anti-Communist forces in Laos and supported a South Vietnamese invasion of Laos. The result of these actions were a series of coups d'état and, ultimately, the aggravation of the Laotian Civil War between the Royal Laotian government and the Pathet Lao. The anti-communists and hawks in the Thai and American governments called for decisive action in Vietnam!

On 30 June 1960, large, Left-wing ,CGIL trade union and pro-democratic forces demonstrated on the streets of Genoa, but it would be violently suppressed by the Italian police. Other popular demonstrations were crushed in Reggio Emilia, Rome, Palermo, Catania and Napoli, causing several deaths. Shortly afterwards, the Democrazia Cristiana, forced Prime minster Fernando Tambroni Armaroli to resign, having been in charge only 116 days as in our world. Unfortunaly no one wanted to let the issue drop and the Mafia assassinated a few more Sicilian judges that they could not buy off.

The early 1960s also saw the beginning of sustained pressure in Panamá for the renegotiation of the canal treaty so they would eventually get control of the Panamá Canal if the USA no longer thought it was strategically important to directly own it.

1961


On January 1st, 1961 a new coalition of Kong Le's Neutralists, Pathet Lao, and PAVN drove 9,000 Royal Lao Army troops from the Plaine des Jarres. On 3 January, the Royal Laotian Air Force received its first counter-insurgency aircraft, American-built T-6 Texans, via the Royal Thai Air Force.

The massive joint Thai/S. Vietnamese/American/Australian joint aerial bombardment of North Vietnam and eastern Laos was led by the United States. Parts of Laos were hit by an average of one B-52 bomb load every eight minutes, 24 hours a day, between May 1961 and June 1962.

On 7 November 1961, Albania’s president, Enver Hoxha made his speech that accused the Soviet President Nikita Khrushchev a "revisionist, an anti-Marxist and a defeatist." Hoxha portrayed Stalin as the last Communist leader of the Soviet Union and began to stress Albania's independence. The USSR and every other Warsaw Pact nation broke relations with Albania by 11 November, 1961.

Enver Hoxha orders the invasion of the Greek territory of Camëria, which is ethnically Albanian not Greek, on December the 9th. The Albanians make little headway and call a uneasy truce with the Greeks on the 18th. A peace summit is called at Gjirokastër on the 19th and the War is officially ended on the 20th.

The Guatemalan president General Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes assumed power and authorized the training of 5,000 anti-Castro Cubans in Guatemala. He also provided airstrips in the region of Petén for what later became the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion in 1961 as in our time line.

1962
South Korea's president Yun Bo-seon (Korea:윤보선, Hanja:尹潽善,) was taken ill for 8 days after a heart attack in his home on January 5th, 1962. President Kim Il-sung's hope of invading the south were dashed as president Yun Bo-seon made a full recovery on the 13th and was discharged from hospital that day.



China also started massing forces in eastern Inner Mongolia (Mongolian: Öbür Monggol and c Өвөр Монгол, Övör Mongol; Chinese: 内蒙古; pinyin: Nèi Měnggǔ) in the January of that year, ready for a planned massive thrust on to the Korean Peninsular.

As time passed, Italy fell in to anarchy, students rioted, the mafia ordered a (failed) hit on the Albanian President Enver Hoxha, a fascist coup occur in Milan on January the 18th and heavly armed Marxist gans rioted in Lazio. Soon Italy was in a state of revolution, then civil war and finally total | Balkanization by the June of 1962. The only stability could be found around both the American NATO bases in Italy and in Turin, which France had sent peace keepers to just after the January coup in Milan had taken place.

By February 1962, the Royal Lao Government's hold on Nam Tha seemed tenuous enough that it was reinforced by the paratroopers of the GM 15 and American Special Forces advisors. As the situation in Laos turned in to a rout the U. S. forced the RLG into a coalition with the Pathet Lao and Kong Le's Forces Armee Neutrale. This technically fulfilled the Geneva Agreements on Laos and triggered the treaty requirement that foreign military technicians be withdrawn from Laos by October, by which time The United States disbanded its Military Assistance Advisory Group. North Vietnam stepped up its attacks and pushed on in to Laos. America would still try and hold on to South Vietnam.

The North Vietnamese retaliated by supporting the Communist Party of Thailand's insurgency in the north, northeast and sometime in the south, where guerrillas co-operated with local discontented Muslims, but never posed a serious military or political threat to the state as in our world.

Mossad's Operation Damocles was a covert campaign of the Israeli in the August of 1962 targeting German scientists and technicians, who had been formerly employed in Nazi Germany's rocket program and were now developing rockets for Egypt at a military site known as Factory 333.

When Egypt's President Gamal Abdel Nasser herd of this after a security leak, he demanded a formal apology from Israel's President Yitzhak Ben Zvi, but he refused to do so.

Nelson Mandela is arrested on 5 August, 1962 and the United Nations starts sanctions to isolate South Africa politically and economically under the Resolution 1761 on 6 November. Neither South Anfrican Prime Minister Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd nor South Anfrican President Charles Robberts Swart are repentant and take pride in the arrest as in our world

The Cuban Missile Crisis
As early as August 1962, the United States suspected the Soviets of building missile facilities in Cuba. During that month, its intelligence services gathered information about sightings by ground observers of Russian-built MiG-21 fighters and Il-28 light bombers. U-2 spy planes found S-75 Dvina (NATO designation SA-2) surface-to-air missile sites at eight different locations. CIA director John A. McCone was suspicious and many in the American government feared a Soviet attack from Cuba.

On August 10, he wrote a memo to President Kennedy in which he guessed that the Soviets were preparing to introduce ballistic missiles into Cuba. The ‘hawks’ in the military became angry and planed for the worse. On August 13, an USAF Air Force Strategic Air Command U-2 was shot down as it overflew Sakhalin Island in the Far East by mistake. The Soviets lodged a protest and the US apologized. 2 days later a Taiwanese-operated U-2 was shot down over Shanghai China, probably to a SAM missile.

Air Force General Curtis LeMay presented a pre-invasion bombing plan to Kennedy on September 1st-3rd, while spy flights and minor military harassment from US forces at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base were the subject of continual Cuban diplomatic complaints to the US government.



On September 7, Cuban President Osvaldo Dorticós spoke at the UN General Assembly and said Cuba would not back down to an American invasion. After American diplomat Adlai Stevenson showed aerial photos of Cuban missiles to the United Nations to the Security Council that day.

US officials were worried that one of the Cuban or Soviet SAMs in Cuba might shoot down a CIA U-2, initiating another international incident. On September 17th, Navy reconnaissance aircraft photographed the Soviet ship Kasimov with large crates on its deck the size and shape of Il-28 light bombers.

At 13:13 UTC, on October 1st, the US informed its NATO allies that "the situation is growing shorter... the United States may find it necessary within a very short time in its interest and that of its fellow nations in the Western Hemisphere to take whatever military action may be necessary." To add to the concern, at 8 am the CIA reported that all missiles in Cuba were ready for action. The presidents of Guatemala and Turkey pledged their sport for the American cause.



The US Navy dropped a series of minor "signaling depth charges" on a Soviet submarine (B-59) at the blockade line around Cuba, unaware that it was armed with a nuclear-tipped torpedo and under orders that allowed it to be used if the submarine was "hulled" On the same day, a US U-2 spy plane made an accidental, unauthorized ninety-minute over flight of the Soviet Union's far eastern coast. The Soviets scrambled MiG fighters from Wrangel Island and in response the Americans sent aloft F-102 fighters armed with nuclear air-to-air missiles over the Bering Sea on October 5th.

The next morning, October 6, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy informed the Executive Committee of the National Security Council (commonly referred to as simply the Executive Committee, EXCOMM or ExComm) that he believed only an invasion would remove the missiles from Cuba.

On October 7th, after much deliberation between the Soviet Union and Kennedy's cabinet, Kennedy secretly agreed to remove all missiles set in southern Italy and in Turkey, the latter on the border of the Soviet Union, in exchange for Khrushchev removing all missiles in Cuba. Unfortunately East German's Walter Ulbricht saw an opportunity to annex West Berlin on October 7th and would thus ruin the peace talks and ordered its invasion that night. As the clock struck 10.00 Berlin time, the East German forces prepared for war!

September 8th
At 00.00, (00.01 UTC) Berlin time, East German and American forces clashed as East German troops launched as surprise attack on West Berlin.

As news reached the Soviets in the morning of the 8th, of the unauthorised war between both the Germanys, which Walter Ulbricht had openly and baselessness blamed West Germany for starting, East-West relations imploded!

All would NATO forces came under sustained attack by East German troops and aircraft, along with some some of the Soviet garrison troops, who did not wait for orders from Moscow, by midday. By the evening they had begun to retreat in to the American/Canadian held part of the city.

The East German's Ministry for State Security (German: Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, MfS), commonly known as the Stasi struck out on the evening of the 8th, with a series of sniper attacks in Hamburg. Oberfeldwebel Konrad Dorf, Brigadegeneral Henrich Dieter Ober and Obergefreiter Hans Ritter were all liquidated in the attacks. Feldwebel Hans Otto Wenger was lucky and survived the attacks, the inter-German war, and ultimately Doomsday as well, which meant he was very lucky indeed!

September 9th
A Stasi bomb exploded at the British embassy in Brussels, killing Colour Sergeant Steve Price (inter-force liaison duties), ATL Μόνιμος Επιλοχίας/Monimos Epilochias Ionnas Stakkis (inter-force liaison duties), W. German Oberstabsfeldwebel Kurt Hime and the British ambassador to Belgium on the morning 9th of September. Oberfeldwebel Konrad Dorf and Brigadegeneral Henrich Dieter Ober and 2 German secitateries, a British attaché and a Greek attaché.

American forces dug in to the few streets they still held as the USAF and the RAF struck out at military targets in Erfurt, Schwerin and Potsdam in the

Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and his sectary were almost assassinated by a booby-trap bomb in their Westphalia bunker on the evening of the 9th.

As the literal and metaphoric smoke settled, more hawkish and right wing elements staged a coup in the parts of West Germany the government still controlled. America and Soviet forces were put on a war-footing in both halves of Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Turkey, Belgium and the UK later that day.

Diplomacy was urged by The British PM Harold MacMillan, Turkish president Cemal Gürsel, Românian president Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, Bolivian president Ángel Víctor Paz Estenssoro, French president Charles de Gaulle and the Australian PM Sir Robert Gordon Menzies at the UN on the late evening of the 9th, since all feared that the conflict would soon go nuclear, chemical and/or biological.

The Australian PM, Sir Robert Gordon Menzies KT, AK, CH, FAA, FRS, QC; made a TV broadcast warming Aussies that a nuclear war was near and the Thai king Bhumibol Adulyadej (Thai: ภูมิพลอดุลยเดช) Rama IX, went on national radio to urge his nation to prepare for an imminent all-out war with North Vietnam and China.

September 10th
The King of Nepal Mahendra Bir Bikram Shah Dev, phoned the American and Soviet embassy on the morning of the 10th, requesting a new summit at the UN, but by now it was too late.

România's president Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, goes on Românian state TV and Radio that afternoon to warn his nation of "the imminent Third World War..." and pledges to oppose the use of chemical, nuclear and biological weapons being used from Romanian territory or by it's forces.

From Crisis to Doomsday.
The American and Soviet leadership both felt betrayed by the German governments and thought it was all part of a covert super-power plot, (each blameing the other.). As the day pass the situation got worse, and a reluctant nuclear war would occur from the launch of missile (a American Regulus missile that hit Vladivostok airport at 00.01 U.T.C. on October the 11th and the launch of the last missile (a Soviet R-12 missile that hit Miami sea-front at 14.55 U.T.C.) on October the 11th, 1962.

Well; Kim Il-sung, Walter Ulbricht, Ho-Chie-Min, Che Guevara and Fidel Castro were only too eager for war, but in this they would get more than they expected!

Also see:

 * Editorial Guidelines- (1962: Doomsday)
 * Add-hock weapons at hand (1962: Doomsday)
 * List of known Warsaw Pact targets in the UK (1962: Doomsday)
 * Armed forces weapons in 1962/1963 (1962: Doomsday)
 * List of surviving nations (1962: Doomsday)