Germans under siege in France

Something I was reading recently referred to Germans under siege at the end of World War II in La Rochelle in France. I checked Wikipedia and sure enough, there were a number of ports which remained in German hands till the end of the war and indeed La Rochelle was under loose siege for nearly nine months till May, 1945.

It was almost a continental mirror image of the island hopping strategy in the Pacific. Hardened outposts such as La Rochelle were simply bypassed. The strategy was adopted in part to avoid French civilian deaths. Nearly 70,000 French civilians died from aerial bombing by allies during World War II with nearly 70% of that occurring in the last 11 months of the war after the invasion of Normandy.

UPDATE: I found the source. It is from the preface to Hell in a Very Small Place by Bernard B. Fall, an account of the siege of Dien Bien Phu in the First Indochina War.

The besieged base to which Fall is referring in his preface was actually Lorient, not La Rochelle.