I know a lot of folks normalize before heat treating but it is really kind of overkill since at that point a good stress relieve should be more than enough to handle anything you could have going on at that stage. Proper normalizing will result in heavy scaling a decarb unless you take the measures you are thinking of, because it involves higher temperatures to refine grain and carbides after very disruptive operation such as forging. Assuming that the work immediately preceding the hardening would be grinding and/or machining then all you really need to do it deal with any strain energy introduced from these, thus a quick heat to 1200F with a short hold before cooling should have you sitting pretty for the hardening. In normalizing after forging, and for my annealing cycles, I make it a rule never to clean any of the forgin scale off before hand, If I am goign to oxidize and decarb something let it be that nasty skin I am going to grind off later anyhow.
