Uhmmmm..NOT necessarily true!..Louis Pasteur didn't make the connection between "germs" and disease - bacteria & their vectors and disease, until his investigative work between 1865 and 1877. It's hard to 1) see how English officers knew about bacterial or viral contamination, or 2) see where they found someone with infectious smallpox, alive, and were able to get the bacteria onto blankets, without contaminating themselves, and getting the blankets, still fresh with the disease to the Indians, and then....
Very quickly this TRUE story starts to look like a Ward Churchilesk fabrication.
Actually, it was documented that the british gave blankets that were used by smallpox victims to a group of indians as a group, hoping they would get the disease and thus be wiped out...
However, what churchill was refering to was an entirely different smallpox epidemic that hit the Mandans sometime in the 1800s...
No, Churchill used an older account as the basis for his anti-american hit piece, plain and simple.
THIS is the problem with people like Churchill - actual real live events are thought false, because they make up lies...
And just as an aside, the letters written by Amherst, and others, during that period are available in the library of congress - interesting readin, if one has the time. It lays it all out in detail...
Maybe Churchill should have actually spent more time actually researching, and less time pontificating... :)