DAY 12: The Herald continues its look back at how the paper covered the Cuban Missile Crisis, which unfolded 55 years ago this month. IT came to be known as Black Saturday. The crisis was acquiring a logic and momentum of its own, author Michael Dobbs would later write. Armies were mobilizing, planes and missiles were being placed on alert, generals were demanding action. The situation was changing minute by minute. The machinery of war was in motion. The world was hurtling towards a nuclear conflict. Soviet and Cuban troops on Havana were bracing themselves for an American invasion. The White House learned that five medium-range missile sites were operational and that it would not be long before the sixth was, too. Kennedy asked how many Americans would be killed if one Soviet missile landed near a US city and was told, ‘Six hundred thousand’.