Dudley Johnson (a fellow VC recipient), Arthur Wakely, Colville Wemyss, Montagu Stopford, John Halsted, Frederick Pile, Gordon Macready, Roderic Petre, Alastair MacDougall, Edmond Schreiber, Michael Gambier-Parry, Richard Dewing, Leslie Hill, Kenneth Loch, Douglas Pratt, Balfour Hutchison, Robert Pargiter, Robert Stone and Henry Verschoyle-Campbell along with Horace Robertson of the Australian Army and Harry Crerar and Georges Vanier of the Canadian Army. Smyth received a brevet promotion to major on 1 January 1928, receiving the substantive promotion to major on 24 August 1929. By this time, he was a General Staff Officer Grade 3 (GSO3) with the 3rd Battalion, 11th Sikh Regiment, an appointment he vacated on 22 November 1929. An early appointment as the Indian Army instructor at the Staff College, Camberley in 1930 further indicated that Smyth's career was on the fast track, borne out by his appointment as a GSO2 at the Staff College on 16 January 1931, with the local rank of lieutenant colonel. He received a brevet promotion to lieutenant colonel on 1 July 1933, and relinquished his appointment at the Staff College on 16 January 1934. On 16 July 1936, Smyth was promoted to the substantive rank of lieutenant colonel, an illustration of how rapidly his career had thus far progressed. He managed to persuade General Lord Gort, then the Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS) and a former instructor at the Staff College in the mid-1920s, as well as being another fellow VC recipient, to give him an undertaking that he would be given a brigade to command in the United Kingdom should hostilities break out. Second World War Having managed to engineer leave from India to the United Kingdom in the summer of 1939, shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War, he called in his debt but was disappointed to be seconded to a United Kingdom-based staff job, as GSO1 of the 2nd London Division, a second-line Territorial Army (TA) formation, then commanded by Major General Harry Willans, which had only recently been formed. In February 1940, after further lobbying, Smyth was appointed to command the 127th Infantry Brigade. His brigade major was Charles Phibbs Jones, later to become a full general. The brigade was one of three which formed part of the 42nd (East Lancashire) Infantry Division, another TA formation, then commanded by Major General William Holmes, which from April he led in France as part of the British