All right, we should never forget the brave men and women who helped bring World War II to an end. Now, a new series from the producers of Band of Brothers and the Pacific is attempting to do just that. Masters of the Air is on Apple TV. It chronicles the courage and sacrifices of US bomber groups who fought behind enemy lines. Take a look.

All that we do. Day in, day out. There's something to a guy, doesn't it? You're here to fight the monsters. There's things these people are capable of. They got to come in. Trust me.

Board, guard, and guide the men who fly through the great spaces of the sky. Are we Tostigian men or what? Sir, yes, sir. Be with them, traversing the air in darkening storms.

Joining us right now, series creator, Jon Orloff. Jon, great to see you. I mean, you're well known for your work on HBO's Band of Brothers and the Pacific. And now, here we are with the Masters of the Air. I mean, how does this feel now after working all this time? What it was about 10 years or so working and then now seeing it to fruition.

It's been an amazing experience. Yes, indeed. It's been 10 years trying to make this and making it. It's just been the most complicated, ambitious thing we've ever tried to do. So we're all very excited it's done and that the world now to see it.

Yeah. And complicated, too, because of just capturing the personal stories, right? Because, look, my dad's a Tuskegee airman. My late dad, he was a gunner. Really? I didn't know that. Right. But, for- Wow. I should be interviewing you. Well, no, No. I don't have all the stories because my dad is of that generation of men in the Tuskegee Airmen who did not share the stories. So I'm a consumer of what you've got there because I would love to hear fill in all the blanks weeks because it was a very difficult time. I mean, of course, they are proud warriors, but it was a very difficult time. And so that generation of men and women suppressed that. They didn't want to impose those hardships that experience on everybody else. We could go on and on about it. But so I'm wondering, how are you able to capture those stories in order to bring this depiction?

Well, this one was a little more difficult than Band or the Pacific because the guys were no longer with us as they were when we made Band. And interestingly, they would talk to people that weren't their family. So when we made Band, they would talk to us, and often their family members would come to the interview so that they could hear the story for the very first time. This time, though, we didn't have that luxury. And so it required an awful lot of research from me and a whole bunch of other people to figure out all the true stories that really happened to these men and to capture that and put it onto the screen. That was our challenge.

Yeah. And it's challenging because it's huge. I mean, there are so many people, so many individual stories. So you truncated it down to, let's talk about two men, specifically, and their journeys, right? Major John Egan and Major Gail Clevin. Is it Clevin? Correct. Yeah, Clevin. Okay. And how did you select those two? How did it come down to getting the book for those stories?

I can say that one was a decision by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks. Before I came on the job, I think it was Steven who read Masters of the Year, the book first. And as soon as he read this book, he was like, We should make a series about these two guys, Buck and Bucky, as their nicknames are. They're just an amazing two men who volunteered in 1940, almost two years before the war began. They became best friends in 1940, and they remained best friends till the the day they died. And it's really at the core of this story is their friendship. And it's an amazing friendship. Oh, my gosh. With amazing journeys and adventures and you're going in an expected places in the show, but all of it true.

Yeah. I know there are going to be a lot of tears in watching it. So what are you hoping people who are going to be watching Masters of the Air? What are you hoping they're going to learn, they're going to really gain from Yeah.

Well, people don't really know what happened up there in the air because the technology to make a movie has never existed to show the scale and the extreme nature of combat at 25,000 feet and 40 below zero in unpressurized cabins. We're really excited for people to see the scale of the war and the unbelievable sacrifice vice that this generation of men made to free Europe and keep the rest of us free and build a world absent of Nazism.

Right. Hey, thank you, Tom Brokaw. That's why they are the greatest generation. Exactly. I mean, there isn't a more fitting- He was not wrong. No, there is not a more fitting title for all of them. All right, John Orloff, thank you so much. What a pleasure.

My pleasure. Thank you so much. Congratulations. Wow, I'm amazed at you being the daughter of a Tuskegee Airman.

That's just amazing to me. We'll talk another time. Okay, great. He was a pretty awesome man. Thank you so much. Very awesome man. Thank you so much. I'm sure. All right.