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The conscription of 12 million men into the military is the only reason for the drop in unemployment.

Conscription began in 1940 (the first peacetime draft in U.S. history). By that time the unemployment rate had already been cut to less than half what it had been at its peak.

Furthermore, there's no reason this should be surprising. Standard macroeconomic theory holds that, other things being equal, government deficits will produce an increase in aggregate demand, which will tend to reduce unemployment (but promote inflation). It was my impression that even the Chicago School monetarists had come around to acknowledging some role for fiscal policy. Government spending, taxes, and deficits do matter.

BfloGuy attributes the improvement to citizens' own efforts. Obviously that was part of it. If that were the sole explanation, though, you'd have to ask why it didn't occur earlier (such as under Hoover). Conservative Coulter Fan criticizes Hoover for trying to keep wages propped up, but Roosevelt did the same thing through the National Recovery Administration and then through the Wagner Act.

I know that "post hoc ergo propter hoc" is considered a fallacy, but sometimes an earlier event does cause a later one. Roosevelt got into office, discarded his own campaign rhetoric, instituted policies that were denounced as "socialism" by Republicans, and saw unemployment plunge as a result. If the change in policies didn't cause the plunge, what did?

You said, "Conscription began in 1940 (the first peacetime draft in U.S. history). By that time the unemployment rate had already been cut to less than half what it had been at its peak."

I'd quote Jim Powell, "From 1934 to 1940, the median annual unemployment rate was 17.2 percent.1 At no point during the 1930s did unemployment go below 14 percent. Even in 1941, amidst the military buildup for World War II, 9.9 percent of American workers were unemployed. Living standards remained depressed until after the war." Please don’t be duplicitous about the continuation of the depression by discounting that unemployment ran high throughout the 1930s and it was the conscription was the key event that accounted in the drop in the unemployment rate, and that the drop in the unemployment rate doesn’t negate the fact that the war didn’t end the depression.

You said, "Furthermore, there's no reason this should be surprising. Standard macroeconomic theory holds that, other things being equal, government deficits will produce an increase in aggregate demand, which will tend to reduce unemployment (but promote inflation)."

To quote on Jim Powell, "As a cure for the Great Depression, government spending didn't work. In 1933, federal government outlays were $4.5 billion; by 1940 they were $9.4 billion, so FDR more than doubled federal spending, and still unemployment remained stubbornly high. Changes in federal budget deficits didn't correspond with changes in gross domestic product, and in any case the federal budget deficit at its peak (1936) was only 4.4 percent of the gross domestic product, much too small for a likely cure."