Branko Mamula

Mamula was born in Kordun in May 1921 to an ethnic Serb family. He joined League of Communist Youth of Yugoslavia in 1940 and at the start of World War II in Yugoslavia in 1941 he joined the Yugoslav Partisans. In 1942, he joined Communist Party of Yugoslavia. During the war, he was put in charge of numerous units, moving through the ranks of the Partisans. Before he became the Defence Minister, he held the rank of admiral as Chief of the General Staff of the Yugoslav People's Army from 1979 to 1982. After becoming Defence Minister in 1983, he was promoted to Admiral of the fleet. He lived in Opatija from 1985 until 1991.^[1][2]

Mamula remarked on the Yugoslav People's Army's (JNA) failure to respond to Milan Kučan's rise in Slovenia, Franjo Tuđman's rise in Croatia, and Slobodan Milošević's rise in Serbia, respectively, in his 2000 book Slučaj Jugoslavija (transl. Case Yugoslavia):

The military leadership of the JNA bears responsibility for not carrying out a coup d'état. Instead, it allowed the nationalist leaders and the separatist behaviour of the two western republics to push the JNA into the hands of Greater Serbian nationalism, which unscrupulously utilised the Army in the inter-ethnic war, and eventually rejected it.^[3]

From 2007, he lived in Tivat, Montenegro. Mamula turned 100 in May 2021.^[4] He died on 19 October 2021, from COVID-19 during the COVID-19 pandemic in Montenegro.^[5]