An experimental technique has been developed to study the strength of materials under conditions of moderate pressures and high shear strain rates. The technique is similar to the traditional pressure-shear plate-impact experiments except that window interferometry is used to measure both the normal and transverse particle velocities at a sample-window interface. Experimental and simulation results on vanadium samples backed with a sapphire window show the utility of the technique to measure the flow strength under dynamic loading conditions. The results show that the strength of the vanadium is approximately 600 MPa at a pressure of 4.5 GPa and a plastic strain of 1.7%.