[jpstewart]

Well just do tar -xvf *.tar than should work

No, it won't.  As I said, the -f option to the tar command takes exactly one file name as an argument.  Any other filenames after that are handled differently.  (And remember that *.tar is expanded by the shell before the tar command sees it.  So if there's more than one file in the current directory that matches *.tar, tar is seeing a list of names.)  You can't extract multiple tar archives with a single tar command like that.