[1] The Confederate general Jubal Early refused to accept her memoirs as fact, and modern scholars have cast doubt upon the veracity of the book's report.

[2] According to her book, Loreta Janeta Velázquez was born in Havana, Cuba, on June 26, 1842, to a wealthy Cuban official and a mother of French and American ancestry.

He felt a deep resentment towards the United States after losing an inherited ranch in the Mexican–American War at San Luis Potosi.

[8] At the outbreak of the American Civil War, Velázquez says that her husband resigned his U.S. commission and joined the Confederate Army.

[10] Velázquez failed to convince her husband to let her join him, so she acquired two uniforms, adopted the name Harry T. Buford and moved to Arkansas.

When the army doctor who examined her discovered she was a woman, she again fled to New Orleans and saw Major General Benjamin F. Butler take command of the city.

In the preface, Velázquez stated that she had written the book primarily for money so she could support her child, perhaps to combat the notion of her profiting from the war.

[14] In 2007, The History Channel aired Full Metal Corset, a program that presented details of Velázquez's story as genuine.

DeAnne Blanton, Senior Military Analyst, National Archives, states in the documentary that her memoir "took her life story and made it a little better."

Blanton and other scholars address the claim of former Confederate General Jubal Early that the book is a fiction but indicate that they largely believe Velázquez.

Historian Elizabeth Leonard, in All the Daring of the Soldier (1999), assesses The Woman in Battle as largely fiction, but based on real experience.

A newspaper report mentions a Lieutenant Bensford arrested when it was disclosed that "he" was actually a woman, and gives her name as Alice Williams, a name that Loreta Velázquez apparently also used.

In October 2016, historian William C. Davis published a biography of Velázquez titled Inventing Loreta Velásquez: Confederate Soldier Impersonator, Media Celebrity, and Con Artist.

Davis asserted that Velázquez was neither Cuban nor a Confederate soldier, but "a thief" and a "prostitute", possibly born in New York, and eventually a "swindler" and "con artist".

Velázquez used many aliases, according to Davis, while he was uncertain of her actual name, age, and place of birth, and thus unable to determine her family, background, or ethnicity.

The woman he ultimately identified as Velázquez served terms in jail for theft and other minor offenses, and subsequently invented glamorous stories about her origin, having learned to lie while working as a prostitute.

[17] In the final chapter, Davis critiqued feminist and Hispanic historiographical approaches to Velazquez, as well as postmodern literary theory, all of which, he said, have failed to accurately evaluate Velázquez's claims and thus "perpetuated" her lies to promote their own agendas.

María Aguí Carter directed Rebel, an investigative documentary, examining the story of Loreta Velázquez.