After a career in the British Army Signal Corps, he retired and with a friend started a company selling body armour, followed by several years working in the telecommunications industry.
Originally writing under the pen name, Otto von Pivka, since his retirement from the military he has written another dozen books, venturing into narrative history with his 1813: Leipzig : Napoleon and the Battle of the Nations in 2001 and Charge!
His research led him to the 2nd Westphalian Hussars, who in turn were descended from the green- and purple-clad Cheaveau Legers Uhlanen of Duchy of Berg.
[2] After serving a brief stint at the Ministry of Defence, Whitehall, he retired from the military to start a new career, selling body armour to the German police, who were at that time combating the Baader Meinhof and other urban terrorist groups.
In 1981, high tech logistics and customer services markets drew him into international computer and telecommunications companies located in Germany, Saudi Arabia and Moscow.
During his assignment to Moscow, where he spent four years, he made several trips to the battlefield at Borodino, and continued developing the material for his compendium, Napoleonic Wars Data Book.
It was a 20-year project, about which Smith commented, "This is the largest and most complex book that I have produced to date and without having committed the last few years to full time, solid research and presentation this work would never have been written.
On the one hand, Smith included interesting first-person narrative accounts of the four-day battle at Leipzig, and this was considered the main strength of his work.
Filled with absorbing accounts of the battle and people's responses to it, Smith's book was considered an interesting read for students of military history, but not necessarily a scholarly contribution to Napoleonic studies.
After explaining how mounted units formed, trained, and operated, Smith focuses on 13 specific battles to illustrate how cavalry could and did turn the tide in several engagements such as Austerlitz, Eylau, Borodino, Albuera, Marengo, and Waterloo, Liebertwolkwitz and Mockern, and the Allied raids on France in 1813.