She served her country primarily in the Pacific Ocean Theatre of Operations, and provided petroleum products where needed to combat ships.

The attacker careened off the ship's bridge and exploded through her forward well deck into a compartment adjacent to her tanks brimming with 300,000 gallons of aviation fuel.

Taluga, entered Tokyo Bay on 26 August, 11 days following the cessation of hostilities, and took up duty as station oiler until early October.

For the next year, Taluga hauled oil from the Persian Gulf ports of Bahrain and Ras Tanura to American bases in Japan and the Philippines.

She stopped at Ras Tanura from 30 November to 5 December; then she continued eastward across the Indian Ocean and up through the South China Sea to Yokosuka, Japan, arriving there on the day after Christmas.

She served with the 6th Fleet in the Mediterranean on occasion and stopped frequently at the Persian Gulf ports, Ras Tanura and Bahrain.

The oiler called most frequently at San Diego, San Pedro, Long Beach, and Seattle, Washington, on the U.S. West Coast; Norfolk on the east coast; as well as Galveston, Texas, Houston, Texas, Cristóbal, Panama, Guantánamo Bay, and Aruba in the gulf and West Indies areas.

However, the renewal of the war by the injection of communist Chinese troops required the United States to increase its flow of men and material to strengthen the sagging defenses.

She departed Long Beach late in July; stopped at Midway Island and Kwajalein; and reached Sasebo, Japan, on 23 August.

Operating from Sasebo at the southwestern tip of Kyūshū, Taluga supported the blockade and siege of Wonsan and Songj in almost until the end of hostilities.

In April 1953, Taluga sailed from Yokosuka, Japan, via Pearl Harbor, and arrived in San Pedro, California, early in May.

On the 17th, she got underway from Long Beach on the first peacetime deployment with the 7th Fleet in a series which lasted until the escalation of the Vietnam War brought the return of a substantial American presence back to the Asian continent.

In January 1955, she took station off Henriette Passe, near Haiphong, to fuel the transport and relief supply ships evacuating refugees from strife-torn North Vietnam during the latter stages of Operation Passage to Freedom, instituted in the wake of the Geneva agreements which followed the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu.

For the next three and one-half years, her crew — made up of 105 civilians and 16 military men — maneuvered her through 875 underway replenishments in support of the 7th Fleet in the Far East.

She was struck from the Naval Vessel Register, 21 February 1992, and transferred to the Maritime Administration (MARAD) for lay up in the National Defense Reserve Fleet, Suisun Bay, Benicia, California.

On 1 July 2010, the ship was moved from the Suisun Bay Reserve Fleet to the BAE Systems' shipyard in San Francisco where she was drydocked for cleaning prior to an ocean tow through the Panama Canal to Brownsville, Texas for scrapping.