[7] After the air raid on Peenemünde on 17 August 1943, German strategic command decided to divide the work on the V-2 rocket among three independently operating centres.

[5] The Nazis used slave labour from the nearby SS Truppenübungsplatz Heidelager concentration camp in Pustków to build new infrastructure, starting with concrete roads, then a narrow-gauge railway line linking to the station at Kochanówka village.

They did this by building an artificial village; cottages and barns were made of plywood, lines were hung with clothes and bed-sheets, and imitation people and animals were created using gypsum plaster.

The first reports came in October 1943 from the Polish underground Home Army (Armia Krajowa) Intelligence HQ in Warsaw, stating that a number of villages around Dębica were being forcibly evacuated.

[13][26] These fragments were then smuggled by AK agents to secret labs in Warsaw, where the rocket parts were analysed by specialist teams, headed by Professors Marceli Struszyński and Janusz Groszkowski, and glider constructor Antoni Kocjan.

[26][29] In early March 1944 British Intelligence Headquarters received a report of an Armia Krajowa agent (code name: "Makara") who had covertly surveyed the Blizna railway line and observed a freight car heavily guarded by SS troops containing "an object which, though covered by a tarpaulin, bore every resemblance to a monstrous torpedo".

[32][33] Around 20 May 1944, a relatively undamaged V-2 rocket fell on the swampy bank of the Bug River near the village of Sarnaki, south of Siemiatycze, and local Poles managed to hide it before Germans arrived.

[8][35] The missile fragments were picked up by a RAF C-47 Dakota aeroplane from an AK agent (code name: "Motyl") in an abandoned airfield between the villages of Jadowniki Mokre and Wał-Ruda, near Żabno, at the junction of the Dunajec and Wisła rivers, Poland.

[28][35] On 13 July 1944, the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill wrote a letter to Joseph Stalin,[36] informing him about the German V-2 missiles being tested in Blizna.

In his letter, Churchill asked Stalin to instruct his troops, who were about 50 kilometres (31 miles) away from Dębica, to search for and preserve safely any apparatus and installations found at the base after it was captured by the advancing Soviet Army.

Stalin granted Churchill's requests; however, at the same time he instructed his army intelligence and USSR State Defense Committee People's Commissar for Aviation Industry, Alexei Shakhurin, to get ready for the examination of the German missiles.

[12] In late July 1944, the advance of the Red Army forced the Germans to evacuate the base at Blizna, and launch activities were moved to the Tuchola Forest.