Many remember TV chef Julia Child for her warbling voice, French cooking, and her chirpy: “Bon appétit!" During WWII, the 29-year-old was more interested in serving her country than boeuf bourguignon, however.

The problem was Julia’s height. At 6-foot-2, she towered over colleagues and was deemed too tall for the Navy’s Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service and the Army’s Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps.

The chef who cooked up shark repellent‍

Julia wasn’t the type of person who took ‘no’ for an answer though. The California native graduated from Massachusetts’ elite Smith College with a Bachelor of Arts and worked as an advertising copywriter - an unusual role for women in the ‘30s and ‘40s.

She joined the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the wartime US spy agency, as a junior research assistant in Washington, D.C. It didn’t take long for Julia to catch the eye of the OSS’s chief spymaster ‘Wild’ Bill’ Donovan, a man she described as ‘smallish and rumpled’ with piercing blue eyes that could read a book just by turning the pages.

Julia was reassigned to the Emergency Sea Rescue Equipment Section where the team developed life-saving ideas. Her first mission? To help develop shark repellent that could be used by sailors or rubbed on pilots who were shot down over the sea.

Sharks were a deadly threat to the US military. Throughout the war, there was also a huge psychological impact on family members worried about the fate of loved ones. One of the worst attacks occurred near the end of WWII when the USS Indianapolis was torpedoed by a Japanese sub. Estimates of the number of Americans who died from shark attacks range from a few dozen to almost 150.

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Shark Chaser

Julia’s boss, Captain Harold J. Coolidge, was tasked with finding a solution. His team included a Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology scientist and Dr. Henry Field, curator of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.

Julia worked alongside them in an administrative capacity, helping them test more than 100 poisons, acids, chemical compounds, and even extracts of decayed shark meat. After about a year, they came up with a promising lead - a ‘cake of copper acetate and black dye that smelled like dead sharks.

The repellent, known as ‘Shark Chaser’, was found to be 60 percent effective and released in small quantities. The OSS attached it to life vests and provided it to airmen. Shark Chaser was also used as a coating for underwater mines intended for German U-boats and Japanese vessels - the US didn’t want sharks nibbling at the explosives before they detonated. 

“I understand the shark repellent we developed is being used today for downed space equipment - strapped around it so the sharks won’t attack when it lands in the ocean,” Child told OSS officer Betty Mcintosh for her book Sisterhood of Spies: The Women of the OSS.

“I must say we had lots of fun,” Child added.
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An American in Paris

During WWII, Julia had not yet scaled legendary culinary heights. In fact, she knew very little about cooking. She met Paul Child, an OSS officer whom she worked with in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), and they married after the war. The newlyweds soon moved to Paris where Paul served in the US Foreign Service. 

Julia had taken a ‘bride-to-be’ cooking class before the wedding but Paris catapulted her into the big leagues of the Cordon Bleu cooking school. Julia Child wasn’t a natural, however, failing her first exam. "My disgruntlement was supreme, my amour-propre enraged, my bile over boiling. Worst of all, it was my own fault," she wrote in her autobiography, My Life in France.

Decades later, Julia Child published her famous Mastering the Art of French Cooking and at least 15 other cookbooks. Her TV program, The French Chef, ran from 1963 to 1973 and made her a household name among middle Americans who had never before heard of Sole Meunière or Filets de Poisson à la Bretonne.
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Julia Child, an award-winning spy

Julia Child was also awarded the Emblem of Meritorious Civilian Service for her work in Chunking, China, where the couple was posted when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, on August 6, 1945.

According to Child’s citation: "Her achievements reflect great credit upon herself and the Armed Forces of the United States.”