After Allied bombing in 1944 breached the sea dikes to flood German positions on Walcheren, Dutch engineers and laborers worked after the war to close the gaps and pump out the salt water, racing the daily tides that poured through the largest breach. They succeeded by sinking massive concrete caissons and old ships into the final gap at the moment of slack water, sealing the sea out and allowing the drowned farmland to be reclaimed.
Draining seawater off flooded farmland does not restore it; the salt left in the soil must be slowly leached out by rain and freshwater over several seasons before crops will grow again. Reclamation is therefore not a single act of pumping but a prolonged biological recovery that outlasts the engineering.
Sealing a breach against the open sea is governed by the rhythm of the tides: the decisive work can only be done in the brief window of slack water when the current between flood and ebb nearly stops. The natural timetable, not human will, dictates when the critical move is possible.
The same deliberate flooding that was a weapon against the occupier becomes, after liberation, a wound the community must undo; the postwar struggle to roll back the sea is framed as the final campaign of the war rather than a separate peacetime project. Seen this way, rebuilding is not a return to normalcy but an extension of wartime sacrifice and collective effort.