The U.S. Golf Association fell for it, as did the National Club Golfer. Indeed I could find no other golf site that didn't fall for it.
They are all excused, for the prank was so typically English, so distinctly representative of the Brits' wartime pluck and perseverance. The spoof originated from the 1940 members of The Richmond Golf Club, Surrey, England. And it was a classic.
In the year cited above, a most "inconvenient event" occurred at the club. Hitler's Luftwaffe dropped bombs on it. Such events are inconducive to a pleasant, relaxing game of golf; moreover, they perforce require adjustments to the otherwise inviolable rules of the game.
At the very least, Nazi bombs descending on one's fairway demanded "a set of tongue-in-cheek Temporary Rules," which, as the Richmond Club notes, "inspired Members produced."
They're also the rules the USGA and other sites have mistaken as genuine. National Club Golfer, for one, writes that "the wartime rules at Richmond were very real."
In a sense, they were. The published rules were British golfers' stiff middle finger extended upward and at Herr Hitler.
Rule #1
“Players are asked to collect Bomb and Shrapnel splinters to save these causing damage to the Mowing Machines”
Rule #2
“In Competitions, during gunfire or while bombs are falling, players may take cover without penalty for ceasing play”
Rule #3
“The positions of known delayed action bombs are marked by red flags at a reasonably, but not guaranteed, safe distance therefrom”
Rule #4
“Shrapnel and/or bomb splinters on the Fairways, or in Bunkers within a club’s length of a ball, may be moved without penalty, and no penalty shall be incurred if a ball is thereby caused to move accidentally”
Rule #5
“A ball moved by enemy action may be replaced, or if lost or destroyed, a ball may be dropped not nearer the hole without penalty”
Rule #6
“A ball lying in a crater may be lifted and dropped not nearer the hole, preserving the line to the hole, without penalty”
Rule #7
“A player whose stroke is affected by the simultaneous explosion of a bomb may play another ball from the same place. Penalty one stroke”
In brief, you Nazi tossers can never defeat us — yes, you're a bother, but not so much of one as to interrupt our golfing in Surrey in any serious way.
Yet the rules were more than local, and they were more than a joke. As Richmond further notes: "[They] attracted publicity and were widely published to demonstrate British defiance of Germany’s aggression."
Aside from invading countries and slaughtering millions of people, a major flaw among Nazis was, well, to be brutal about it, they simply had no sense of humor. For example, Richmond's rules caught the jaundiced eye of Herr Goebbels, who then had the traitor Lord Haw-Haw deliver this radio announcement:
By means of these ridiculous reforms the English snobs try to impress the people with a kind of pretended heroism. They can do so without danger, because, as everyone knows, the German Air Force devotes itself only to the destruction of military targets and objectives of importance to the war effort.
William Joyce, a.k.a. the propagandist "Lord," himself tried to impress people with pretended heroism, saying just before an Allied rope stretched his Nazi neck in 1946, "In death as in life, I defy the Jews who caused this last war."
His use of the verb defy was likely an unexpected treat for Surrey, England's golfers. For they, and nearly 50 million other Brits, were the authentically defiant ones — and, unlike Joyce, they lived years longer to tell about it.
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(From the war's photo files, and courtesy the Luftwaffe: A bit of a fairway divot.)