Harold Shook was born in April 1920 in Portland, Oregon, one of two children born to his mother, who died when he was three years old. He spent his first eight years in Oregon, until his grandmother brought him to San Francisco, California to be with his father. His first airplane experience was a "penny a pound" ride in a Ford Trimotor [Annotator's Note: American three engine transport aircraft]. As a youngster, he played baseball and went fishing, but when he first laid eyes on a P-26 [Annotator's Note: Boeing P-26 Peashooter fighter aircraft] pursuit airplane, he set his sights. He graduated high school at age 16, worked for a year, then got his two years of higher education and also enrolled in college pilot training. He signed up for the Army Air Corps, but was told there would be a delay, so he went to the Navy, and underwent their tests and passed. On second thought, he decided to wait for the Army Air Corps, and joined their ranks on his twenty-first birthday. He went through primary, then basic, and advanced flying schools, and became an instructor for a short time. Then, on 7 December 1941, when he was sitting in a theater in Phoenix, Arizona, a sign flashed across the screen stating that "Pearl Harbor Attacked." He got into P-40s [Annotator's Note: Curtis P-40 Warhawk fighter aircraft] at Hamilton Field [Annotator's Note: Hamilton Army Airfield in Novato, California] and loved to do acrobatics. He "got his first fighter ride" about 15 December, and went to Charlotte, North Carolina where he learned to "get the utmost" out of his plane.

In Charlotte, North Carolina, Harold Shook was "just a junior birdman," and at the start of his time there witnessed a plane go nose first in the roof of a hangar, killing the pilot. He also saw a plane crash on landing, but the pilot climbed out of the biggest piece of the wreckage and dusted himself off. He got used to being offered grits for breakfast, and became an instructor pilot. During that time, he spent a three month period at Mitchell Field in New York, flying a P-43 [Annotator's Note: Republic P-43 Lancer fighter aircraft] and working with the Army Signal Corps to develop high altitude radar. Shook said he "had a ball." He wanted to get into combat, and considered joining the Royal Air Force, but satisfied himself with accumulating fighter time and turning raw recruits into fighter pilots. He felt he was saving a lot of lives in that role and continued in it until January 1944.

Air-to-air [Annotator's Note: air-to-air combat] was Harold Shook's thing; he loved to dogfight and volunteered for combat at least three times before he finally, as a captain with a good reputation as a fighter pilot, got his chance. "Out of the blue," he was called to report to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina to take command of 300 men, build a team that would constitute the 404th Fighter Group [Annotator's Note: Shook commanded the 506th Fighter Squadron, 404th Fighter Group, 9th Air Force], and take them into combat. He knew he could handle the flying. He was ready for combat but had concerns about leading so many guys. Shook described the pilot selection process, and how he managed, in five weeks, to pull the ground support unit together. He noted that one of the pilots he personally trained got 26 victories with the 56th Fighter Group. He compared the several aircraft he flew, and praised the P-47 [Annotator's Note: Republic P-47 Thunderbolt fighter aircraft] "Jug" as a rugged airplane that saved his life on more than one occasion.

In early March [Annotator's Note: March 1944] Harold Shook went on a special mission to bring three guys up to New York City and he flew from Myrtle Beach, South Carolina in a plane that had lost electricity. When he got to LaGuardia to land, he had no communications and no lights. Those guys were making the plans for Shook's 404th Fighter Group [Annotator's Note: Shook was the squadron commander of the 506th Fighter Squadron, 404th Fighter Group, 9th Air Force] to deploy to Europe. He sailed from New York, seasick, across the Atlantic to Stirling, Scotland, then traveled south to an air base in England as part of the 404th Fighter Group. When he first arrived, he flew with another group on three missions, the very first of which was to escort B-24s [Annotator's Note: Consilidated B-24 Liberator heavy bomber] to Frankfurt [Annotator's Note: Frankfurt, Germany]. He remembers the mission especially because it was his first experience with flak [Annotator's Note: antiaircraft artillery fire], and he saw one of the big bombers explode. The next mission was to dive-bomb. After the third mission, Shook was qualified to lead his squadron. His primary purpose was to fly ground attack, and of the 105 missions Shook flew, only about a dozen of them were escort missions. He liked the teamwork of close support, knocking out tanks and 88mm guns and twin 40mm guns, as well as interdiction missions knocking out airfields, rail yards and bridges.

Harold Shook flew on the first 50 missions of his squadron [Annotator's Note: 506th Fighter Squadron, 404th Fighter Group, 9th Air Force] because he felt it his job to lead them. Then he trained other men to lead. A day or two before D-Day in Normandy [Annotator's Note: Allied invasion of Normandy, France on 6 June 1944], they painted black and white invasion stripes on their "birds" [Annotator's Note: slang term for an aircraft]. In their briefing on the morning of 5 June 1944, Shook was told the mission was going that day. Their mission was to cover Omaha beach "at all costs." There were 48 aircraft from their fighter group scheduled to fly. But on 5 June, the weather was terrible, so General Eisenhower [Annotator's Note: General of the Army Dwight David "Ike" Eisenhower, Supreme Commander, Allied Expeditionary Force; 34th President of the United States] postponed the operation for 24 hours. The weather was just as bad on 6 June, but the mission launched, and Shook was first off from his airbase. He was certain they had reached the beach when one of his squadron was shot. When he went down to try to help, the Navy let loose on him, and he had to pull away. On his second mission, he looked down, and said he will "never, ever forget" his two major impressions: the magnitude of the armada, and the thousands of guys dead and injured on the ground.

Recalling some of the highlights of his experiences, Harold Shook said it didn't look like the Luftwaffe [Annotator's Note: German Air Force] would be of concern during the rest of the Normandy landings, and the fighters went back to dive bombing and strafing. They knocked out big industrial targets at Saint Lo [Annotator's Note: Saint Lo, France], came home and refueled, and then went further inland and knocked out a big marshaling yard and rail station. On the way home, he took four of his 16 planes and attacked a cluster of German tanks he saw on their way south, and knocked out four of them and some staff vehicles. As they flew over the hedgerows on the way back, he attacked and disabled a big German gun, but Shook's plane got shot in the process, and his aircraft flipped. He nosed the plane up and, with no engine and a hole in one wing, he got the plane safely down. Shook went on to describe how the fighters addressed the Falaise Pocket on several missions. Shook said Hitler [Annotator's Note: German dictator Adolf Hitler] "lost his hat and spats" in that area thanks to the air support. When they moved on to the Loire River, it was reported that the Germans agreed to surrender if General Patton [Annotator's Note: US Army Lieutenant General George S. Patton, Jr.] would keep the air support out of the picture.

The 506th Fighter Squadron [Annotator's Note: 506th Fighter Squadron, 404th Fighter Group, 9th Air Force] was called off the Falaise operation [Annotator's Note: the Falaise Gap, Normandy, France], and Harold Shook's orders were to patrol the River Seine from Le Harve [Annotator's Note: Le Havre, France] to Paris [Annotator's Note: Paris, France]. He spied a tugboat with five barges and decided to make them his target, but he got hit, and was losing oil. He put the plane down on a Normandy beach and doubled up with another pilot from his squadron to get back to base. [Annotator's Note: At this point the audio and video is intermittent.] Shook talked about how he tried to follow the principle of "take care of your people and they will take care of you." He knows that his faith helped him through all his difficulties. Today his mission is fourfold: keep God in our lives, keep World War 2 in our memories, get the history of the war taught in the school systems, and take care of the homeless veterans.

He has no memory of VE-Day [Annotator's Note: Victory in Europe Day, 8 May 1945], but Harold Shook remembered that on VJ-Day [Annotator's Note: Victory Over Japan Day, 15 August 1945] there was "one whale of a party." Still in the United States military when the war with Korea broke out, Shook went on to fly Sabrejets [Annotator's Notes: North American F-86 Sabre jet fighter aircraft] with a fighter group and three squadrons. He said the two most important times in his life were Normandy and Korea: those experiences define him. The time he spent in the Air Corps gave him a foundation in religion and morality. In his mind, there was no question that the United States had to be involved in the Second World War, because the German and Japanese leaders were crazy and bent on world domination. Shook believes America is a responsible nation and continues to be involved in world affairs because of it. He believes "absolutely" in the importance of institutions like The National WWII Museum [Annotator's Note: in New Orleans, Louisiana] that relate the whole story of the war. He feels "secular" people of today feel uncomfortable about being politically incorrect, and are reluctant to expose the facts. When he is invited to speak to school children, he makes three points: wars are nasty, and we should do anything to avoid them, but keep a strong military for when we need to engage; learn to work as a team; and find out what freedom is about.