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 occurs in times of war. Knowing My Father serves as a companion to Joe Tedeschi's memoir, A Rock in the Clouds.

Joe Tedeschi is a 1957 graduate of West Point who retired a regular Army colonel after a twenty-eight-year career. He then worked fourteen years in the defense industry developing a counterbattery radar for three European nations. His 1966 combat tour in Vietnam was cut short by a violent airplane crash, and this near-death experience and its aftermath provides the narrative for his first book, A Rock in the Clouds, which earned a 2022 bronze medal award from the Military Writers Society of America. He was ordained a deacon in 2002 in the Catholic diocese of Trenton, New Jersey, and retired in 2020 after eighteen years of active parish ministry.