The Washington Monument grounds hosted huge outdoor displays of military equipment during and after World War II.

The accompanying Air Force photo depicts a captured German Messerschmitt Me 262 jet fighter.

In technical talk, the plane was Me 262-1A/U1 werke number 110306, given the U.S. "foreign equipment" serial number FE-610. This photo was taken at the test center at Wright Field, Ohio, but this very same Me 262 was displayed in different markings at the Washington Monument in August 1946. My dad took me to this display of captured wartime equipment but my memory is vague. I was seven years old.

The Me 262 was the world's first operational jet fighter. When the plane was displayed to Adolf Hitler at Insterburg, Germany on November 26, 1943, Hitler said that having this jet would help Germany win the war.

The Germans built 1,400 of the planes. According to Air Force records, they shot down 509 Allied aircraft, while 100 were lost in combat. Had they been available sooner or in greater numbers, Me 262s might have influenced the war's outcome.

Led by Col. Harold E. Watson, a group of U.S. intelligence experts called "Watson's Whizzers" brought many advanced German aircraft to the United States for tests after the war. This booty included eleven Me 262s.

In postwar years, Larry Green, an engineer at North American Aviation, Inc., in Los Angeles, studied the German language in night school to help in scrutinizing documents about the Me 262. Green was part of a team designing the F-86 Sabre, the American jet that fought in the Korean War.

One of the Me 262s now belongs to the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum. Another is displayed at a museum in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania. But documentation doesn't exist to show what happened to all of the captured Messerschmitts.

For many years, a different Me 262 was outdoors near the main gate to the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) along the Anacostia River in Washington. I saw it there, derelict, in May 1959.

But what happened to the plane in the picture, werke number 110306, which would be a historical treasure today?

No one seems to know. The plane was at Freeman Field, Indiana, in about 1946 and is seen in a film clip widely circulated on the Internet. It appeared at the Washington Monument show and was then transferred to Cornell Aero Lab in Ithaca, New York. No one seems to know what happened to the jet after that. The best guess is that the missing Messerschmitt — one of the few two-seat versions to be captured — was scrapped in about 1950.

About me: my new book is "Mission to Berlin," a Stephen Ambrose-style history of B-17 Flying Fortress bomber crews in World War II. I've been searching for years for photos taken of military equipment displayed at the Washington Monument grounds and of the plane at NRL. Contact me at (703) 264-8950 or robert.f.dorr@cox.net