When the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939  American filmmaker and freelance photojournalist Mary Marvin Breckinridge (1905-2002)* was traveling through Europe on two photojournalism assignments. She immediately went to London, where she took some of the first photos of air raid shelters and documented the evacuation of British children from the city. She was one of only four American photographers in Britain for the first months of the war and she saw no reason to leave. As she wrote to her mother, “I had planned to take the first boat home if war should start, but it now seems foolish to run away from the most interesting thing that I could be doing on earth right now.”

In November, 1939, Edward R. Murrow, head of CBS’s newly founded news division in Europe, invited Marvin to appear on a radio broadcast about changes the war had brought to England, based on a piece she had done called “An English Village Prepares for War.” That broadcast was followed by a second about women firefighters in London. Soon thereafter Murrow hired her as CBS’s first female staff broadcaster in Europe, despite the long-standing prejudice against women newscasters in radio. Murrow told Patterson: “Your stuff so far has been first-rate. I am pleased, New York is pleased, and so far as I know the listeners are pleased. If they aren’t to hell with them.”

One of only a handful of American women in Europe working in radio,** Breckinridge made fifty broadcasts from seven countries, including Germany. Broadcasting from Berlin, she famously slipped a negative assessment of Germany past the Nazi censors.*** Mentioning the German newspaper Völkische Beobachter, she said, almost as an aside “The motto of this important official paper is Freedom and Bread. There is still bread.”

Breckinridge’s broadcasting and photojournalism careers ended abruptly in June 1940 when she married American diplomat Jefferson Patterson, who was then serving in Berlin. The State Department did not allow diplomatic spouses (which effectively meant wives) to publish photographs or articles or to broadcast on the grounds that such work could compromise diplomatic work.  What a loss!

*She chose to use the name Marvin as an adult so as not to be confused with her cousin Mary Breckinridge, who founded the Frontier Nursing Service. Breckinridge (Marvin, not Mary) made an acclaimed silent film about the Frontier Nursing Service, The Forgotten Frontier, which was released in 1930.

**Including Sigrid Schultz, who added broadcast journalist to her resume in September 1938 during the Munich Conference. At first she worked as a stringer for the Mutual Broadcasting System, which was a cooperative radio network owned by member radio stations, including WGN in Chicago, which was a Tribune affiliate. By January, 1939, Sigrid was a regular in the Mutual lineup, with a fifteen-minute segment of news and analysis that ran on Sunday evenings live from Berlin

***Not that easy to do. A trio of German censors had to approve each script before broadcasters went on the air.

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