more dangerous bow attack. Her fire on that group proved so effective that only one plane managed to penetrate her defenses to make his drop between Wainwright and the convoy. All the others prudently dropped their torpedoes about to from the destroyer. That resulted in a torpedo run to the convoy itself in excess of . The ships in the convoy easily evaded the torpedoes approaching from the bow, but the torpedoes coming from the starboard quarter found their marks, and . Wainwright, though, had put up a successful defense. Her antiaircraft gunners damaged three or four enemy planes and generally discouraged the raiders from pressing home their attack with the vigor necessary for greater success. Not long after that attack, at about 1900, Wainwright parted company with convoy PQ 17 to rejoin her own task unit, then heading off to meet the supposed threat posed by the possible sortie of a German surface force built around , , and . Convoy PQ 17, naked to the enemy after the Support Force withdrew to meet a danger which never materialized, scattered. Each ship tried to make it to northern Russia as best she could. Luftwaffe planes and Kriegsmarine submarines saw that few succeeded. After more than three weeks of individual hide-and-seek games with the Germans, the last groups of PQ 17 ships straggled into Archangel on 25 July. Operation "Rosselsprung" as the Germans dubbed the action, had proved an overwhelming success. It cost the Allies over two-thirds of the ships in PQ 17. However, Wainwrights brief association with the convoy probably saved several others from being added to the casualty list. Wainwright continued to escort Atlantic convoys through the summer and into the fall of 1942. However, no action like that she encountered on 4 July occurred. It was not until the first large-scale amphibious operation of the European-African-Middle Eastern theater came along in November that she again engaged the enemy in deadly earnest. For the invasion of French Morocco, Wainwright was assigned to the four-destroyer screen of the Covering Group (Task Group 34.1) built around , Tuscaloosa, and Wichita. Assembled at Casco Bay, Maine, that group got underway on 24 October and, two days later, rendezvoused with the remainder of Task Force 34 (TF 34), which had sortied from Hampton Roads. The task force reached the Moroccan coast on the night of 7/8 November. The invasion was scheduled for