Girl, 7, wins national writing competition with story about RAF navigator 

A seven-year-old girl has won a national writing competition for her story about an RAF navigator.

Sarah Mirkin wanted to teach people about her Krio heritage so wrote a story about John Henry Smythe – one of the few West Africans to serve in the RAF during the Second World War.

By 1943, Flight Lieutenant Smythe, a navigator with 623 Squadron, had flown 26 missions as a Short Stirling bomber crew member.

• UK's first black Army officer inducted into National Football Museum Hall of Fame
• Lives that mattered – the black experience of WW2
• The remarkable life of the British Army's oldest surviving female veteran

He had a reputation for being lucky as he always made it back safely even when his plane was hit. 

But on 18 November 1943 Smythe's luck ran out and his aircraft was shot down over Germany. 

He had been hit twice.

He was captured by the Nazis and spent 18 months in a Prisoner of War camp in Germany.

After the war, Smythe was deployed as a senior officer on the Empire Windrush – a ship tasked with taking former military personnel back to their homes in the Caribbean.

He later went on to become a barrister and Sierra Leone's attorney general.

Sarah says she chose to write about Smythe because she saw him as an inspirational example of someone from the Krio culture.

Her winning entry in the competition, run jointly by publisher Scholastic and Cocoa Girl Magazine, is included in the book 'Bedtime Stories, Beautiful Black Tales From The Past', a short story treasury about figures and events from black history.