Adam Dupalo was born on 20 June 1923, in the village of Dupale near Rujevac in the Dvor na Uni area. Soon after his primary schooling, he had witnessed crimes commited by Ustasha soldiers. He belonged to a group in the SKOJ (Alliance of Communist Youth of Yugoslavia), which was connected with the uprising on Šamarica mountain, and in this capacity he was in charge of distributing leaflets and dispatching medical supplies to the rebel camp.
At the end of December 1941, he joined the partisans and after his military-political training in 1942 he took an oath, and when the SKOJ district committee was established, he first became its organisational and then political secretary. In May of the same year, he became a platoon political delegate of the Banija partisan unit. In November 1942, he became a troop commissar in the Eighth Banija Brigade, which became a part of the Seventh Banija Elite Division,with which he participated in difficult battles on the Neretva river. He was promoted to the rank of commissar of the First Battalion of the Eighth Banija Brigade during the battle of Sutjeska.
At the beginning of 1944 Dupalo was assigned to work with the Banija youth, and was the first elected president of the USAOJ (United Alliance of Antifascist Youth of Yugoslavia) and secretary of the SKOJ Division Committee, then secretary of the SKOJ District Committee and member of the Communist Party of Croatia District Committee for Banija. Among his many duties, Dupalo was present during the establishment of Prosvjeta in Glina in 1944, and at the beginning of 1945 he became an instructor for the military at the SKOJ district committee for Croatia. He continued to hold functions in youth organisations after the end of the war.
In the JNA (Yugoslav People’s Army), he had duties within the Corps of National Defence of Yugoslavia (KNOJ), then as the youth leader at the Command of the Navy, and later he became assistant commander of the Fifth Zone and the Senior Military Navy Academy. Bubalo retired in 1976 with the rank of captain of warship. He was an editor of several Navy magazines and a member of the editorial team for the book Seventh Banija Elite Division and for the anthology about Dvorna Uni. He had numerous functions within SUBNOR (Federation of the Association of WW2 Veterans) and in 1991 he was vice-president of its national committee. He worked as an expert consultant during the shooting of various films and participated in creating the Šamarica themed museum. He received many medals, commendations and awards for his work including the order of Stjepan Radić for exceptional contribution to antifascist foundations of the Republic of Croatia, which was delivered to him in 2011 by president Ivo Josipović.
This ultimate expert and living encyclopaedia on the circumstances regarding Banija and the war path of the Banija partisans, which he poured into the book Banija and Sisak in Peoples Liberating Movement (NOP) 1941, reacted to all attempts to revise history and overemphasise the roles of certain persons and units in the war.
Dupalo opposed ritual and false antifascism, widely present in Croatia after the1990. He emphasized that the war of the 1990’s, because of its character, could not be compared with the one of the 1940’s, especially in light of knowledge about what had been happening to numerous Banija villages and their inhabitants after the operation Storm. Fighting against negating the positive role of Serbs in history, especially in his beloved Banija, Dupalo gave support to Serb organisations, even if, at times, he disagreed with some opinions of their leaders.
Dupalo died in Zagreb on 6 December 2014 after a long illness. He was posthumously awarded by the Serb National Council’s Gojko Nikoliš award for promoting antifascism.