On the Embu and Meru Fronts, there were fierce battles just as in Murang’a and Nyeri. For instance, on January 1954, General Ruku’s force, about 500-strong attacked the ‘Ntharagwa enemy camp near Nanyuki.
The fight raged from 12:30 p.m. until midnight. The enemy put up fierce resistance, however, they were routed and forced to abandon the camp. Several of them were killed, and the five that were captured alive were immediately executed.
The guerrilla army seized weapons and burned the enemy camp before they disappeared into the darkness. In the same month, General Ruku’s force defeated the enemy at the Munithu battle; and Brigadier Muchoki overran the Katheri enemy post and left it smoking. The Kamurita Battle was the biggest battle fought during the month of January 1954.
General Mwariama explains: We fought a big war at Kamurita. We fought for four hours. The whole forest was on fire due to heavy bombing. After four hours of fighting, we dispersed the colonial troops. We lost seventeen men and seven more slightly wounded. We killed more than twenty enemy soldiers—majority of them national traitors; we captured their weapons.
After the Kamurita Battle, according to General Mwariama, the guerilla army traveled towards Embu in the night, arrived in Maranya, where it overran an enemy post, burnt it down and seized plenty of firearms.
In February of 1954, the guerrillas attacked and overran the Molinduku enemy post, executed the enemy captives and set the post on fire. The same month, the guerilla army attacked the enemy airbase in Timau; caught by surprise, the defenders abandoned the base. The guerrillas seized war material and burned the post down.
In the rural villages and hamlets, according to multiple sources, the Meru KLFA forces operated in small bands eliminating local traitors, destroying colonial cultural institutions and attacking police and humungati posts in the night.
Raids upon the livestock and property of European planters, setting fire on their plantations and homes in the Nanyuki and Timau areas, were intensified.
Because of intense guerrilla activity in the area, most of the European settlers, together with their families, were forced to spend their nights in the police station or in the army barracks for protection.
In Embu, the enemy posts were less formidable, and many attacks directed against them during this offensive. Most of them destroyed and the defenders eliminated.
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