He was commissioned into the
Queen's Own West Kent Yeomanry in 1915 and reached the rank of
Captain. He subsequently served in the front line with the
Household Battalion of the
1st Life Guards, serving on the Friends of National Spain committee. However, at the
Anschluss of
Austria by
Nazi Germany in March 1938, he opposed, with
Winston Churchill, the
appeasement of
Adolf Hitler by
Neville Chamberlain's government. He sent a statement of support to the inaugural national meeting of
Moral Re-Armament, an
anti-communist organisation, in the
United States in June 1939. Cazalet became the liaison officer with Polish General
Władysław Sikorski, who served as Prime Minister of the
Polish government-in-exile, in 1940.
Promoting military ties with the United States Cazalet also termed himself "a booster for America" and had publicly expressed the gratitude of British subjects for the aid that America gave Britain before and after World War II began. In 1940 he wanted Britain to give the US a free port in the
West Indies, with all sovereign rights so that the
US Navy could have a port closer to South America. He also hoped that the US and British Navies would join after the war to "pool their policies and ideas". He feared that a failure of Britain and the United States to reach an agreement, regardless of the other countries involved, would lead to a dangerous competition in shipbuilding between both countries that would seriously jeopardise world peace: In 1929 he said, "Each country should build the ships it needs without regarding the other navy as a possible enemy". In 1941, during the
London Blitz, Cazalet urged the American government to keep the lifeline between their countries open. "The victory can be won," he emphasised, "if the stuff gets over". He added that Britain was deeply grateful for the help it had already received from the US. However, although Jews were also victims of Nazi aggression, they were still not recognised as allies of Britain. Although he never knew his grandfather, Edward Cazalet, the latter had first inspired his interest in establishing a Jewish state. An industrialist based in Russia, Edward had written a number of treatises in the 1870s in which he advocated a
Jewish homeland and wrote that "under English protection the Jewish nation, after eighteen hundred years of exile, would have it in their power to return again to their own country". According to Cazalet biographer
Robert Rhodes James, Edward Cazalet had seen the
pogroms against the Jews in the
Russian Empire, and their plight made a "profound emotional appeal to him". His efforts failed, however. At a 1941 conference in the United States in which he was joined by Sikorski, Cazalet advocated forgetting differences and "uniting all forces in an effort to defeat the enemy". He saw the struggle in
Palestine as setting an example for the rest of the world. "Although the war has held up our program as far as Palestine is concerned, in God's good time the Jewish State will be established and it will contribute as much happiness and prosperity to the Arab as to the Jew." During a speech in April 1941, Cazalet stated: On 27 June 1943, a week before he was killed, he visited
Cairo and then
Jerusalem, where he met with
David Ben-Gurion and others. His last public statements recorded were at that meeting, in which he said, "I would gladly give my life for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, as I am ready to give my life for the preservation of the British Empire.... Whatever happens, the Jews
must have a permanent home." ==Death and legacy==