The War Department assigned Louis Zamperini an “official death date” and President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed a condolence letter, but Sylvia Zamperini refused to believe her son was gone.“None of us believed it. None of us. Not underneath, even,” she later recalled after “Louie” — the inexhaustible Olympian from the 1936 Berlin Olympics — was found alive.

After his bomber crashed in the Pacific in 1943, he and the pilot, 2nd Lieutenant Russell Phillips, survived 47 harrowing days adrift at sea, battling sharks, starvation and enemy fire. Captured by the Japanese, they endured brutal treatment in POW camps for more than two years.