NOT much given to foreign travel, I can nevertheless claim one visit of rare distinction – though I didn’t properly appreciate it at the time.

Back in 1951, when I was just 13, I was among what must have been the first visitors to the D-Day beaches.

I accompanied an aunt and an uncle, who took me along with their own two boys on what was primarily a business trip by the uncle, to Nantes in the Loire valley. At Dover, the uncle’s car, an Austin saloon, was swung aboard our ship by crane: cross-Channel travel was still that primitive.

Everywhere we went we were treated like VIPs. The owner of a vineyard, in whose chateau hotel we stayed one night, gave us a personal tour of his wine cellar. But though my uncle had served in Germany during the war, he had no direct aim of seeking out reminders of the conflict. Perhaps at that point his generation wished to put the war firmly behind it.

So, when we called at Arromanches on our return, its D-Day relics were largely incidental, though striking enough to be photographed.

Yes, there they were, not far off shore – the great prefabricated concrete breakwaters of the Mulberry Harbour, assembled to serve the invasion force.

They lay directly in front of our seafront hotel – a turreted building which I have since recognised from TV pictures. Like the chateau owner, our host could not have been more attentive to our small party. It wouldn’t surprise me if he had waived the bill.

Sadly, the bloodshed on that beach just seven years earlier scarcely registered with me. Despite evidence that some kids today can confuse Churchill with Julius Caesar, I’m sure there are many 13-year-olds who have a keener sense of D-Day than I had.

Which brings me to US President Barack Obama. How sharp is his sense of D-Day? At last weekend’s commemoration he said the beaches had become a place of pilgrimage because of the “sheer improbability of the victory”.

Surely that is a major misjudgement? The Allies would hardly have spent years planning D-Day if they had believed success was “improbable”.

Of course, it couldn’t be guaranteed. But there had to be at least an even chance the invasion would succeed for it to be mounted at all. The Allies probably rated the chances higher than that. Would General Eisenhower, the supreme commander, otherwise have commissioned a film of the invasion – the classic, The True Glory? There had to be a degree of confidence behind a gesture like that.

A famous still photograph shows a GI swimming on to Omaha beach. Now 87, he was interviewed by Channel 4. He believed every one of his comrades in the landing craft perished.

The invasion succeeded because the Allies had made sure there were enough troops following on to overrun the defenders. Their victory was heroic, costly, certainly uncertain.

But improbable? No.

FACED with Labour’s calamitous performance in the Euro and local elections, the party’s deputy leader, Harriet Harman, insisted that “no one is better placed than Gordon Brown” to sort out Britain’s mess.

Of course, she is right. Whoever occupies No 10 is “better placed” than anyone else to run the Government.

But whether that person is the best person is an entirely different matter.