Operation Anvil (Mau Mau Uprising) authorities. Within 48 hours the British had detained 206 known insurgents. In the following weeks over 50,000 Africans were detained and questioned. Nevetheless, numerous leading figures among the rebels managed to escape from Nairobi into the countryside. The operation ended on 26 May. Operation Anvil marked a turning-point in the British campaign against the Mau Mau. The action left the insurgents mostly isolated in the forested mountains of Nyandarwa and Kirinyaga without access to supplies and the assistance of passive supporters. It proved to be the most sophisticated undertaking of the Kenyan Emergency. In the following weeks Mau Mau activity
Mau Mau Uprising night of 25–26 March 1953, in which they herded men, women and children into huts and set fire to them, hacking down with machetes anyone who attempted escape, before throwing them back into the burning huts. The attack at Lari was so extreme that "African policemen who saw the bodies of the victims were physically sick and said 'These people are animals. If I see one now I shall shoot with the greatest eagerness, and it "even shocked many Mau Mau supporters, some of whom would subsequently try to excuse the attack as 'a mistake. A retaliatory massacre was immediately