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MWSA Review
Knowing My Father is a voyage of discovery that works on two widely diverse levels. The author is a decorated U.S. Army veteran who was a teenager when his father died. In the months and years that followed this personal heartbreak, he came to realize that he really did not know much about his late father beyond the understanding that he was a good, loyal, and loving family man.
Eventually, the author’s haunting sense of loss compelled him to examine his father’s upbringing and early life through genealogical sources and public records, including his military records. While piecing together a more robust profile of his dad, he uncovered a pivotal incident in his father’s World War I service with the U.S. Navy Armed Guard. This discovery led him down a new path to explore a deadly collision at sea involving his father’s ship.
At the height of the war, Germany’s pursuit of unrestricted submarine warfare in the Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea was threatening the survival of the Allies, especially Great Britain. Convoys of merchant ships and tankers were eventually manned with U.S. Navy gun crews as additional protection against U-Boat attacks.
Much of the book focuses on a convoy of thirty-two merchant ships and their escorts, which sailed from Halifax, Nova Scotia, on March 18, 1918, bound for England. The author’s father was making his third Atlantic crossing as a Navy gunner aboard a U.S. civilian tanker, the O. B. Jennings. Five days later the convoy was in the English Channel, maneuvering to avoid U-Boats in the dark of night. Another ship in the convoy, the British freighter War Knight, rammed into the Jennings, igniting its cargo of volatile naphtha with tragic loss of life. Although his father was one of the survivors of the collision, he surmised that the deadly incident had a lasting effect on his dad.
The author conducted extensive research into the events and decisions leading up to the collision. During his research, he accessed multiple sources, including British Admiralty Court of Enquiry archives, to reconstruct the incident and its aftermath. Citations are documented in the text with extensive footnotes. While the bulk of the text deals with the deadly collision between two WWI merchant ships, the author’s father remains at the center of the story.
In the end, the author achieved his primary goal—essential understanding of his father’s developmental experiences as a young man. He states his assessment simply and eloquently: “Researching my father’s early life has been truly cathartic. I really feel that I got to know him better, especially by reliving his World War I experiences.”
In a broader sense, he later concludes: “… [W]riting this book allowed me to better know and understand my long-lost father and to pay tribute to all the brave men who risk their lives going down to the sea in ships during time of war.” The value to the greater reading public will come from its thorough and gripping account of a single tragic incident during WWI that typifies the cost of the German submarine war on Allied shipping during WWI.
Review by Peter Young
Author's Synopsis
Knowing My Father: The Collision of the O. B. Jennings and War Knight relates Joe's methodical search to know more about his long-lost father. In that search, Joe discovers the tragic story of the fiery collision of the US tanker O. B. Jennings and the British merchant ship War Knight during World War I as their convoy evaded German U-boats in the English Channel. A US Navy armed guard defending the O. B. Jennings, gunner's mate Michael Tedeschi was heroically rescued by the British Royal Navy escorts from the burning sea. Joe satisfies his search to know his father better and, at the same time, reveals and exposes one of the unfortunate naval disasters that occur in times of war. Knowing My Father serves as a companion to Joe Tedeschi's memoir, A Rock in the Clouds.
Format(s) for review: Paper or Kindle
Review genre: Nonfiction—Memoir/Biography
Pages/Word count: 128 / 28,160
