Now Olga gave to each soldier in her army a pigeon or a
sparrow, and ordered them to attach by thread to each
pigeon and sparrow a piece of sulfur bound with small
pieces of cloth. When night fell, Olga bade her soldiers
release the pigeons and the sparrows. So the birds flew
to their nests, the pigeons to the cotes, and the
sparrows under the eaves. The dove-cotes, the coops, the
porches, and the haymows were set on fire. There was not
a house that was not consumed, and it was impossible to
extinguish the flames, because all the houses caught on
fire at once.
...but no explanation for the spontaneous combustion of the cloth-bound sulfur.
Sounds like it was probably a closely-kept, obfuscated military secret like Greek Fire:
Certain chemicals will spontaneously combust when wrapped in cloth. They absorb into the cloth, and the increased surface area exposed to the air lets them react with oxygen faster, producing heat. The cloth also insulates it so the heat slowly builds up until it gets hot enough to combust.
Hehe, same here. And then my Dad would come in calmly pointing out that this house might come in in handy as a place to live in the future as well.
He once really stalled on us, we were stuffing an empty 7.62 cartridge with explosives and he very clearly explained that while he though we shouldn't make fireworks at least we shouldn't use metal parts.
We continued with a small plastic tube and a couple of hours later it went off in my hand. I love my Dad for a lot of reasons.
We weren't blessed with such weaponry in the UK. About all we got was 12 gauge shotgun cartridges and anything we made ourselves. The latter included ANFO so we made up for it through chemistry. This was 25 years ago; doing this now would get you chucked in prison in 2 seconds flat.
It's more of a mythos than a documentary. In reality they could've used more conventional incendiary weapons of the time to burn down Korosten, then historians may have made a nice-sounding legend.
Sounds like it was probably a closely-kept, obfuscated military secret like Greek Fire:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_fire