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 to have been sent to was the one run out of Embakasi Prison, for Embakasi was responsible for the Embakasi Airport, the construction of which was demanded to be finished before the Emergency came to an end. The airport was a massive project with an unquenchable thirst for labour, and the time pressures ensured the detainees' forced labour was especially hard. If military operations in the forests and Operation Anvil were the first two phases of Mau Mau's defeat, Erskine expressed the need and his desire for a third and final phase: cut off all the militants' support in the