Despite failing health, Mr. James tried to convince government officials and other Americans that ``Unit 731,'' the Japanese army's infamous biological warfare group, had experimented on himself and POWs in a prison in Mukden, Manchuria.   Like Mr. James, many had survived the Bataan Death March in the Philippines.

Dozens of Mukden survivors contend that Japanese and U.S. officials have covered up the experiments on Americans for more than a half-century. Both governments, however, maintain there is no evidence to prove the allegation.

Mr. James' daughter, Ria Robitsch, said that her father died in his sleep at home Tuesday of an apparent heart attack.

A Mercury News article in 1995 revealed that a declassified U.S. military file provided for the first time clear evidence that U.S. intelligence agents didn't pursue numerous leads indicating that captured American troops were victims of grotesque biological warfare experiments.   The file showed that U.S. military officers maneuvered to suppress the reports because of a secret deal granting Emperor Hirohito and many high-ranking military officers immunity from prosecution in exchange for tissue samples and reports on human experimentation that might help give the United States a germ-warfare advantage over the Soviets.

``Frank James was a courageous man,'' said Greg Rodriquez Jr., a Washington, D.C.-based researcher who has devoted his life to exposing the germ-warfare issue.   ``I'm disappointed that he didn't live to see the day when all the documents about Emperor Hirohito and Unit 731 are declassified.''

Rodriquez's father, also a Mukden survivor, died in 1996 after suffering a lifetime of mysterious fevers.

In 1986, Mr. James told a U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee that the captured Americans, along with several hundred British and Australian soldiers, were met in Mukden on Nov. 11, 1942, by a team of Japanese medical personnel wearing masks.   They sprayed liquid into the prisoners' faces and gave them injections, Mr. James testified.

By the end of the winter, about 250 Americans had died, and their bodies were stacked like cordwood.   When spring came, Mr. James, who by then weighed 80 pounds, was one of two POWs ordered to work with a Japanese medical team, picking up the half-thawed bodies.

Some bodies were dumped in a mass grave and others, identified by tags on their toes, were taken by Mr. James and the other POWs to a table.   Mr. James watched a medical team dissect the bodies and place their vital organs in wooden boxes, clearly labeled with POW numbers.

For more than three decades after the war ended, the story of Unit 731, which experimented mostly on Chinese civilians, remained one of the war's best-kept secrets. Then, in October 1981, John Powell, who once published a Shanghai magazine, wrote in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists about documents suggesting U.S. military leaders felt that obtaining the germ-warfare data outweighed the advantages of prosecuting Japanese war criminals.

Coupled with the assertions of Dr. Murray Sanders, an aide to Gen. Douglas MacArthur, commander of the Allied powers in Japan, Powell's disclosures led to the 1986 congressional hearing at which Mr. James was the only Mukden survivor allowed to testify.

Mr. James and Rodriguez said they were both told by a congressional staffer that if they mentioned MacArthur's name they would be ``gaveled down.''   The hearing ended after half a day.

``We were just pawns,'' Mr. James told a Mercury News reporter in 1995.   ``We always knew there was a coverup.''

Mr. James continued to speak to small and large groups and told his story to ABC's ``20/20,'' CBS's ``60 Minutes'' and the British Broadcasting Co.

``Even with his poor health, he keep fighting for justice and a just cause,'' said Ignatius Ding of Cupertino, spokesman for the Alliance for Preserving the Truth of the Sino-Japanese War.   ``He went out of his way to find out the truth.''

A year after testifying before Congress, Mr. James met more personal tragedy when two of his daughters, Carolyn and Lynn, died after Carolyn fell off a cliff north of Big Sur while walking her dog.   Her sister jumped into the water to save her, but both drowned.

Congress didn't take up the Mukden and Japanese germ-warfare issue again until the late '90s after pressure from U.S. veterans groups and Chinese-American groups trying to expose Japanese atrocities in China that began with the march into Manchuria in 1931.

On Dec. 27, President Clinton signed a law carried by U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., that requires the U.S. government to ``locate, identify, inventory (and) recommend for declassification'' all classified documents relating to Japanese war crimes.  But some researchers such as Rodriquez remain skeptical because of the law's ``national security'' exemptions.

Robitsch, Mr. James' daughter, recalled the struggle he had with his health.   ``He would get the shakes and couldn't figure out why,'' she said.   ``He had angina and was never without his nitroglycerin pills.   He had hardening of the arteries, diabetes and liver problems, and always had to lug around an oxygen tank.   He went to the Veterans Administration Hospital for appointments seven or eight times a month.

``Considering the hard life he led, I'm glad that he went this way, without having to be in a hospital with tubes sticking into every part of his body.   It was the way he deserved to go.''

Contact Ken McLaughlin at
kmclaughlin@sjmercury.com or (831) 423-3234.

Born:  Sept. 11, 1921, Kokomo, Ind.
Died:  Jan. 2, 2001, Redwood City

Survived by: Wife of 44 years, Luise, of Redwood City; a daughter, Ria Robitsch, of Redwood City; two grandsons, Aaron and Patrick Robitsch of Redwood City.

Services:  Memorial services at 11 a.m. today at Redeemer Lutheran Church, 468 Grand St., Redwood City.

Memorial: The family requests donations to the Redeemer Memorial Fund, 468 Grand St., Redwood City, Calif. 94062.