In the news: The Falklands war

It would be fair to say that the majority of Britons had, at best, a vague knowledge of a cluster of British-owned islands in the Atlantic before 2 April 1982. But after that, the Falklands was being mentioned in every newspaper and television current affairs programme. The conflict was, and remains, the largest UK air and naval combat operation since the end of the Second World War. 255 British service personnel and three civilian islanders had been killed and 775 wounded before Brigade General Mario Menéndez, the commander of the Argentine garrison in Port Stanley, surrendered to Major General Jeremy Moore on 14 June.