After stopping briefly at New York, Arikara moved on to Casco Bay, Maine, where she operated between 10 February and 2 March towing targets and participating in antisubmarine warfare training.

Throughout the period leading up to the invasion, Arikara helped to repel German air attacks; and, though near misses shook her considerably, she suffered neither hits nor significant damage from shell fragments.

On the afternoon of 5 June, the tug stood out of Weymouth, England, on her way to the sector of the Normandy coast code-named by Allied planners as "Omaha Beach".

After the first waves of assault troops stormed ashore, the tug began her primary assignment, clearing wrecks from the beach area reserved for the erection of the artificial harbors.

Soon, however, German fire began to take such a heavy toll of landing craft that Arikara had to abandon salvage operations in favor of the even more urgent work of rescue and repair.

Her work enabled the less heavily damaged landing craft to remain in action, thus maintaining the flow of troops and supplies during the critical phase of the assault on "Omaha" Beach.

Though she came under air attacks and fire from shore batteries, her only major damage came from the explosion of a nearby mine while she was towing the disabled French destroyer La Surprise[verification needed] back to England for repairs.

She headed for Italy on 1 August, reached Naples on the 3d, and joined Rear Admiral Spencer S. Lewis' TF 87, code-named "Camel" Force, for the mid-August invasion of southern France.

Staged through Ajaccio, Corsica, Arikara's unit, the force's salvage and fire-fighting group, arrived off St. Raphael on the Mediterranean coast of France on the morning of 15 August, the day of the assault.

For more than a fortnight, the tug remained in the transport area, salvaging damaged ships and landing craft, fighting fires, and keeping the approaches to the beach clear of wrecks.

The tug entered Pearl Harbor later in January but remained there only until resuming her westward voyage on 4 February, bound ultimately for the Ryukyu Islands.

To begin the campaign, during the last week in March, American forces took Kerama Retto, a small group of islands about 15 miles west of southern Okinawa.

On the night of 2 April, the tug went to the assistance of USS Dickerson after that high-speed transport had suffered a devastating suicide crash from a Kawasaki Ki-45 "Nick" twin-engine reconnaissance/ground attack aircraft.

During the next few years, her towing and salvage operations took her to such varied locales as the Panama Canal Zone, the west coast of the United States, Hawaii, Okinawa, and the Marianas.

The tug also served as a communications ship and landing control vessel during amphibious operations at Pusan on the southeastern tip of the Korean peninsula.

The 20 October amphibious assault on Wonsan, mooted by the arrival of rapidly advancing Republic of Korea (ROK) ground forces, was transformed into an enormous reinforcement and logistical support operation.

In July, the ship towed an AFDB to Guam; in August, she returned to Pearl Harbor; and, in October and November, she made a round-trip voyage to Subic Bay in the Philippines.

That fall, Arikara moved to the Marshall Islands to support Operation Ivy, a nuclear bomb test conducted at Eniwetok Atoll in November 1952.

In the fall of 1954, the tug began peacetime deployments to the Far East and, for the remainder of her Navy career, she alternated between assignments in the western Pacific with the 7th Fleet and operations out of her home port, Pearl Harbor.

During the first 12 years of that period, the tug's Far Eastern itinerary included mostly Japanese, Korean, and Philippine ports of call while her operations out of Pearl Harbor took her to the waters off the coast of Alaska and surrounding the Aleutians, as well as to islands in the Central Pacific.

By the fall of 1966, the tug found herself calling at such places as Vũng Tàu and Da Nang to provide towing and other support services for Navy units engaged in fighting communist insurgency and North Vietnamese aggression in South Vietnam.