MOUNDSVILLE, W. Va. -- He has never set foot in the Pentagon, but Francis Turner is America's most powerful and experienced military commander. He led both the American and German armies at Normandy; he pushed aside Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee to seize control of all the troops at Appomattox; he was both the genius who planned the Sioux ambush in the Black Hills and the blockhead who led Custer's men into it.

As owner and director of the Official Marx Toy Museum, Turner is the undisputed warlord of thousands of the little plastic army men who fueled the bloodlust of an entire generation of baby boomer boys in the 1950s and 1960s.

''These are from the days when toys didn't have to be so politically correct,'' says Turner, waving his arm at the long snaking row of glass display cases inside which countless cowboys and Indians, Yankees and Confederates, cavemen and dinosaurs and Martians and astronauts are eviscerating, decapitating and generally disrespecting one another. ``That's probably why they were more fun.''

Turner's museum, though improbably and inaccessibly located in this all-but-abandoned rustbelt that was once the home of the biggest toy-soldier factory in the world, is the Mecca for a growing population of toy collectors (among their ranks: Steven Spielberg, Robert De Niro, Robin Williams and Ruben Blades) searching for the lost armies of their childhood. They come from as far away as Great Britain to gaze at his displays of plastified carnage.

''I had a man last summer stand right in that spot where you are, staring at my Revolutionary War playset,'' Turner says. ``I'm telling you, he hardly moved. He talked to anybody who came near about how he had one of those sets as a kid, and all the neighbor boys always wanted him to bring it over to play. For some people, this is their lives.''

These days, when ''playing'' means clustering around a video game console or a computer screen, that may seem like a nutty exaggeration. But in the '50s and '60s, plastic toy soldiers were to little boys what Barbie was to little girls: indispensable and ubiquitous.

DIME STORE BAGS

They could be bought anywhere from 59 cents for a plastic bagful at a dime store to a princely $6.99 for the elaborately packaged playsets containing tin buildings and fortresses, so many of them (The Alamo! Valley Forge! D-Day!) that the toy sections of department-store catalogs looked like military training manuals.

The demand for plastic soldiers (or spacemen and aliens, cops and gangsters, cavemen and dinosaurs, basically any two groups that wanted to annihilate one another) turned toy tycoon Louis J. Marx, whose company offered the first set around 1950, into the Bill Gates of his day. By the mid-1950s, one of every 10 toys in America was manufactured by Marx, and he even made the cover of Time magazine. (''As a boy Marx excelled at baseball, basketball, ice-skating and shoplifting,'' the magazine noted incisively.)

Marx spent little on advertising but cannily coupled his business to another growing baby boomer phenomenon, television. Davy Crockett, Roy Rogers, the Lone Ranger, Gunsmoke, The Rifleman and The Untouchables all had their own playsets.

But growing discontent with the Vietnam War launched plastic soldiers on a long march to extinction. When the Marx company went bankrupt in 1978 (six years after Louis Marx sold it for $51 million), they all but vanished from store shelves.

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