The Sabre engine certainly had reliability problems, though I think later in the war they were probably comparable with those of other combat engines. The Sabre particularly disliked operating from loose-dirt advanced airfields, due to sucking vast amounts of dirt into its air intakes, which destroyed the sleeve valves. It was interesting that Clostermann flew the Tempest (originally called Typhoon Mark II, and later redeveloped into the Sea Fury, which Australia and the UK used as a carrier-launched aircraft in Korea). The Sea Fury, incidentally, like the Typhoon and Tempest, was mainly a fighter-bomber (i.e. a ground-attack aircraft), but despite this, and despite it being a propeller-driven aircraft, one of them shot down a MiG 15 in air-to-air combat in Korea. That Chinese pilot must have been having a bad day.
Probably the Typhoon's greatest accomplishment was providing ground-attack air support for the D-Day invasion. Eisenhower credited the Typhoons with enabling his forces' breakout from the beach-heads, after things had started to look sticky for them. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawker_Typhoon
