on the 28th, bound for Torokina, Bougainville, in the Solomons, escorting the troopships of Transport Division 38. En route, she touched at Finschhafen on the 29th during the division's stopover to embark troops and reached Torokina on 1 December.Wickes remained at Torokina, Empress Augusta Bay, until the 15th, patrolling the outskirts of that body of water in company with her sister-ships of DesRon 49. The next day, she began the return trip to the Admiralty Islands but stopped in the Huon Gulf for a landing exercise to prepare for her next slated operation. She finally reached Manus on the 21st. The destroyer spent Christmas in port and replenished her logistics requirements until the 27th. Underway on that day, Wickes proceeded to Luzon for the assault at Lingayen. On the approach run, the ship—screening tractor groups "Able and Baker" of TF 79—steamed with TU 79.11.3. Embarked was a new fighter-director team taken on at Manus. The northbound run proved largely uneventful, except for what the ship's historian called "a moderate amount of heckling" by enemy aircraft day and night. Again, Wickes proved exceptionally adept at fighter-direction duties. Her team vectored CAP planes to oncoming enemy planes, and they accordingly splashed four Nakajima Ki-44 "Tojo" fighters into the waters off Luzon on the morning of 8 January 1945. The ship herself did not fire upon any enemy planes until reaching Lingayen Gulf itself the following day, 9 January, when she fired at a pair of attacking planes, driving them off but not splashing them. That same evening, Wickes departed the coast of Luzon with her charges, screening the unloaded ships as they headed out of the battle area. About one-half hour before sunrise on the morning of 10 January, a Japanese plane—a single-engined fighter—pushed over in a dive and dropped a bomb which exploded off the destroyer's starboard side, close aboard. Fragments, scything through the air, wounded 15 sailors topside and punctured the ship with a few small holes. That brush with the enemy, and the light damage inflicted by the attacker, did not keep the ship off the "front lines", for she was soon back in action again, operating on antisubmarine patrols in Leyte Gulf during most of the time between 13 and 25 January. On 26 January, she sortied as part of TG 78.3 and took station as escort and fighter-director ship for the passage of the task group through