With the majority of the escorts ordered to return to Scapa Flow, only the close escort of anti-aircraft auxiliaries, corvettes, minesweepers and armed trawlers was left to protect the scattered ships. They were found there by a flotilla of corvettes, who escorted the four-ship convoy plus two other merchant vessels to Arkhangelsk, arriving on 25 July. Designed with a divided rear window, was it Ford or Chevy who built the 1963 Sting Ray Coupe? The Ginetta G60 was built as a two-door coupe and featured a V6 engine and six-speed manual transmission. What if a diesel engine sits for three years without running? The convoy's defence scheme was revised, with a very strong constant close escort of sixteen destroyers and the first of the new chinese escort girl london carriers, HMS Avenger, with twelve fighters and three Swordfish ASW aircraft. When the order to scatter the convoy was received, it had covered more than half of its route and lost three ships. When the head of the Soviet Military Mission in London, Admiral Nikolay Kharlamov and the Soviet ambassador, Ivan Maisky, asked when Convoy PQ 18 would sail, Pound said nothing could be done until better air cover was arranged - after which Kharlamov criticised the order to withdraw the cruisers from Convoy PQ 17. Pound, angered by the comment, stated that he had ordered the convoy to scatter; Maisky commented that "even British admirals make mistakes".

A BV 138 took over the shadowing from the Kondor and the first air attack began at 7:10 p.m. The absence of long-range programs such as army pilot rotation also began to bear bitter fruit as the war dragged on past expectations. As the larger escort vessels retreated from the suspected German surface force, messages on Merchant Navy wavelengths began to be received by the destroyers: "Am being bombed by a large number of planes", "On fire in the ice", "Abandoning ship", "Six U-boats approaching on the surface". The crews used white paint from Troubador, covered the decks with white linen and arranged the Sherman tanks on the merchant vessels' decks into a defensive formation, with loaded main guns. On receiving the third order to scatter on 4 July 1942, Lieutenant Leo Gradwell RNVR, commanding the anti-submarine trawler HMS Ayrshire, did not want to head for Arkhangelsk and led his convoy of Ayrshire and Troubador, Ironclad and Silver Sword north. Action in the North Atlantic, a 1943 war movie starring Humphrey Bogart and Raymond Massey, includes a section which is drawn from Lieutenant Gradwell's actions after Convoy PQ 17 scattered.

After the war there was criticism of this delay in American and Soviet sources. Two American ships, Samuel Chase and Benjamin Harrison, docked at Murmansk. From 7 to 8 July, five more ships were sunk (two by U-255), including SS Olapana and SS Alcoa Ranger. Of the 34 ships which had left Iceland, 23 were sunk; two British, four American, one Panamanian and two Russian merchant ships reached Arkhangelsk. Churchill called the convoy "one of the most melancholy naval episodes in the whole of the war". Photosynthesis is not magical, however - it's just the cool chemical handiwork of these little cellular structures called chloroplasts, a type of organelle found only in plants and eukaryotic algae (eukaryotic means possessing a clearly defined nucleus) that captures sunlight and converts that energy into food for the plant. Matériel losses in the convoy were: 3,350 vehicles, 210 aircraft, 430 tanks and 109,466 short tons (99,316 t) of other cargo such as food and ammunition. The deliveries amounted to 70,000 short tons (64,000 t) out of the 200,000 short tons (180,000 t) which had started from Iceland.

An escort swept its ASDIC beam in an arc from one side of its course to the other, stopping the transducer every few degrees to send out a signal. Detailed instructions in each ship's signal book laid down the actions that were to be taken by each ship on receipt of this order. This latter signal was intended merely as a correction of technical wording from "disperse" to "scatter" but this was not known at the time. The order to scatter was only used under immediate threat of surface attack. SS Paulus Potter had been abandoned by her crew after an aerial attack on 5 July; the ship was boarded by sailors from U-255 on 13 July; after taking the ship's documents and flag, Kapitänleutnant Reinhart Reche sank Potter with a torpedo. The standard Navy ship deployment lasts for six months; however, the Navy is experimenting with deployments shorter or longer than six months to make them more flexible and less predictable. New York City has already been experimenting with connected vehicle technology, under a federal initiative. On 5 July, six merchantmen, including SS Fairfield City and SS Daniel Morgan were sunk by the Luftwaffe and six more by four U-boats.