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Aside from military operations, the Home Army was also heavily involved in intelligence work. This included reports submitted to the Allies regarding German troop placement and German war production. German factories utilized Polish slave laborers who often managed to supply AK intelligence with vital economic information. Passed on to the Allies these reports served as basis for bombing raids and contributed to the weakining of Nazi economic power, and hence war-making capability.

Perhaps the biggest intelligence coup carried out by the Home Army involved work done with regard to the German "Wunderwaffe" - the V-1 bombs and the V-2 rockets. As early as 1939 the Allies were alerted to German experiments with new kinds of weapons through the anonymous, and still mysterious Oslo Report. This was a document passed on to the British diplomatic attache in Oslo by unkown person(s) which detailed some of the experiments being carried out by the German military. However, given its unkown source and unprecedented information the British discounted the report in the fear that it was a German counter intelligence provocation meant to expose British agents or to divert their attention from other strategic objectives.

However, by the summer of 1941 Home Army intelligence began receiving reports from its field units regarding some kind of secret tests being carried out by the Germans on the island of Uznam in the Baltic Sea. A special "Bureau" was formed within intelligence group "Lombard", charged with espionage inside the 3rd Reich and the Polish areas incorporated into it after 1939, to investigate the matter and to coordinate future actions. Specialized scientific expertise was provided to the group by the engineer Antoni Kocjan, "Korona", a reknown pre-war Glider constructor. Furthermore, as part of their operations the "Bureau" managed to recruit an Austrian Anti-Nazi, Roman Trager (T-As2), who was serving as an NCO in the Wermacht and was stationed on Uznam. Trager provided the AK with more detailed information regarding the "flying torpedoes" and pinpointed Peenumunde on Uznam as the site of the tests. The information obtained led to the first report from the AK to the British being sent in the summer of 1942. It was, purpotedly, written by Jerzy Chmielewski, "Rafal", who was in charge of processing economic reports the "Lombard" group obtained.

Combined with intelligence obtained from non-Polish sources this became enough to convince the British that "something was going on" in Peenemunde on Uznam. Consequently Churchill issued an order for a bombing raid. After a deft ruse on the part of the RAF which mislead the Germans as to the intended target of the raid, Peenemunde was succesfully bombed on the night of August 17th, 1943 (Operation Hydra). The action was the largest bombing raid of the war thus far and involved more than 600 bombers. It managed to destroy the manufacturing facility, most of the test launching pads and rockets and killed some of the scientific personnel including Walter Thiel , although the chief architect of the V-2 program, Werner Von Braun survived. By the Nazi's own estimates the bombing raid delayed the development of the V-1 and V-2 by more than 6 months, which pushed the date past the crucial day of the Normandy invasion.

The raid also forced the Germans to move their test operations to a new locale; deep in occupied Poland in the General Government, near the village of Blizna. This presented the AK with a unique opportunity to gather more information and to make an attempt at intercepting one of the fired test rockets (most of which did not explode). At the same time the production of the weapons was transferred to the concentration camp at Mittelbau-Dora, located deep within Harz Mountains in Germany.

The AK quickly located the new testing ground at Blizna thanks to reports from local farmers and AK field units, who managed to obtain on their own pieces of the fired rockets, by arriving on the scene before German patrols. In late 1943 in cooperation with British intelligence, a plan was formed to make an attempt to capture a whole unexloped V-2 rocket and transport it to Britain.

At the time, the opinion within British intelligence was divided. One group tended to believe the AK accounts and reports, while another was highly sceptical and argued that it was impossible to launch a rocket of the size reported by the AK using any known fuel. Unbeknownst to the British, the Germans had developed a new highly concentrated form of liquid oxygen which made the V-2 rockets a reality. Some experts within both British and Polish intelligence communites quickly realized that learning the nature of the fuel utilized by the rockets was crucial. Hence, the need to obtain a working example.

An opportunity presented itself in early 1944 when a V-2 rocket fell near the village of Sarnaki on the Bug river and local Poles managed to hide it before German arrival. Subsequently, the rocket was dimsantled and smuggled across Poland. Then, in operation Most III (Bridge III) a British plane secretly landed in occupied Poland, near the town of Zabno, where protected by local partisan units the most vital parts of the rocket were sent to London, escorted by Jerzy Chmielewski.

It is difficult to asses the overall impact of Home Army's intelligence work with regard to V-1 and V-2 on WW2. On one hand, the allies never developed succesful counter defenses against the V-2 rockets. Hence, while the early capture of a rocket by AK was quite a feat in pure intelligence terms, it did not necessarily translate into significanct results on the ground. The German development of the weapon simply took too long for it to have any impact on the course of the war. On the other hand, the AK did alert the British as to the dangers posed by the rockets which led them to allocate more resources to bombing production and launching sites and thus lessened the eventual devestation caused by them. Another line of argument persued by some historians points to the fact that the resources used by Hitler in the development of the "Wunderwuffen" could have been more efficiently used in the production of standard weapons, such as more standard air craft for the Luftwaffe.

It is however certain that the bombing raid on Peenemunde of August 17th 1943, carried out on the basis of Home Army intelligence, and even against the judgement of a section of British intelligence community, did have a significant impact on the course of the war. It delayed the development of both V-1 and V-2 by six months or more and gave the Allies crucial time. This is particularly important in light of [[Operation Overlord]] as originally V1 bombs and V2 rockets were supposed to be used against any possible invasion force as much as against London (it should be noted that Antwerp, after being taken by the Allies, also suffered from heavy bombardment by these weapons). According to Dwight Eisenhower, if the Germans had ben able to fully develop and utlize their new weapons six months earlier, the Normany invasion would have been extremly more difficult, if not impossible" and Operation Overlord would've resulted in a defeat to the Allies. Churchill, althouh more reseved in his assesment (he thought that a major disadvantage of both weapons was their lack of preciosion) stressed that the delay in the development spared London six months of suffering, facilitated the allied offensive and finally allowed 'Montgomery's forces to overtake many of the launch sites for V-1 bombs located on the Northern coast of France"

References used:

Michal Wojewodzki 'Akcja V-1, V-2'

Churchill

Eisenhower 'European Crusade'