OK, I got it figured out finally primarily thanks to renard who had similar issues on a message he had posted in the "Unix for Advanced & Expert Users" forum.
First, the GNU version of tar I downloaded does not support the command format "tar --extract --file=file.tar filename"
the --extract and --file arguments are deprecated in the version I downloaded even though they still work in the version supplied with Suse and Fedora. The command I should have used was "tar -xvf file.tar /exactpath/filename"
I was able to extract a single file without any problems. I guess that using the --extract/--file flags does not give an error message since I never received one.
Thanks for the help